Rowan Tree and Red Thread

We played a three-hander of Race for the Galaxy last night, with a dripping wet alaimacerc who heroically cycled across town in a torrent to come play. Some towels, woolly socks and a loaned dressing gown later, we got into RftG for the second time, again starting with the pre-set hands but making sure we each had a different starting homeworld to the previous game.

I had New Sparta this time, and drawing on what little I remembered from Boardgamegeek discussions I got to work building up my military and exploring for valuable cards. sammywol was Earth's Lost Colony, alaimacerc Alpha Centauri, and they both got to work on getting some production worlds down and building their engines for generating more cards.

Again the play was slow, though a bit faster than the first play. I'm worried that the increased speed was due more to one less player than the previous game and not so much to our increased familiarity with the game and the cards. I think we can speed it up more, but I'm afraid we're never going to get it down to sub 1 hour with alaimacerc. He's just too much of a decision tree junkie to let go and just play the damn cards.

It did wrap a good deal closer than the first game, with sammywol 38, alaimacerc 32 and me 31. I felt I was hampered for cards throughout and I really needed to get more production going earlier. It felt very like some of my early Puerto Rico games, where the production engine never really hit its stride. That said I did alright and would have done better if I'd managed to get at least one of the 6-point developments even vaguely useful to a military strategy.

More please!