Galaxy's Edge Review

A game that I was able to find pretty inexpensively (and thus tried out) was Galaxy's Edge.

In Galaxy's Edge, each player takes on the role of a budding galactic empire. On each turn they are able to move their flagship and either place a colony or a military installation. After placing a colony or installation, the player will roll a die - this will let the player either draw or play a card, or it will move one of the players' "ban" tokens (the ban token prevents all players from placing any colonies or installations in that sector).

One of the interesting concepts of Galaxy's Edge is how the military installations work. When placing an installation, a player may choose to place a 1, 2, or 3-tier military base. When resolving who influences a sector, you determine which tier is the lowest one in which only one person has that tier of an installation (what this means is that, if 2 different people have a 1-tier base, 2 people have a 2-tier base, but only one person has a 3-tier base, the person with the 3-tier base wins). This causes players to do more than simply place the biggest military base possible each time.  However, the aspect of this that seems more frustrating is that if two players have military bases around a sector, then they will cancel out and the person that doesn't have any military will wind up keeping their settlement.

Another interesting concept in Galaxy's Edge is the difference in placing military installations and colonies. Colonies score points at the end of the game, but military installations can allow a player to take colonies from other players when all of the systems in a sector have been settled. Overall, however, this aspect doesn't seem to work very well as it winds up being much more beneficial to simply place colonies and go for the end of game points almost every time.

Another concern with Galaxy's Edge is that it is a very generic space game. There were no new concepts introduced in the game. Whereas most space games allow you to take on a race, and that race has different powers, Galaxy's Edge just gives each player a generic spaceship to start with. There are races that each player can have the most "influence" over (only used in end of game scoring), but even then these races are pretty generic.

The next problem with Galaxy's Edge is that there were several aspects of the game that seemed almost pointless. Moving your flagship towards the end of them game and the "ban" tokens both seemed to be just tacked on at the end of the game. Also, the playing of cards was more frustrating than helpful - since you had to roll a die to either draw or play a card, you will wind up not playing very many and being frustrated wishing you were able to play them occasionally.

The main problem with Galaxy's Edge is that it isn't especially fun. We played through the game, and all of the mechanics seemed to work, but playing through the game didn't motivate me to play it again. Obviously each person will have their own opinion of what is fun, and so some people may enjoy this more than I did, but the 3 other people that I played the game with agreed that the biggest thing missing in this game was a sense of fun.

Overall, I give Galaxy's Edge a 5.5/10. If you are really a huge fan of space games and find this one cheaply, you may check it out, but overall there are better games in the genre that I would recommend playing first.