Solo Race for the Galaxy

Race for the Galaxy is my current most played game, at 240+ plays. It is also Michelle's most played game, at 230+ plays. When its expansion The Gathering Storm came out, there was no doubt that I would buy it. The expansion comes with some new cards, the objectives (which most veteran players seem to prefer to play without), and the solo variant.

In the solo variant, you play the two-player advanced game against a robot. You get a bunch of unusual components for this variant, and quite a bit of unfamiliar rules for how the robot works. The robot's actions are driven by dice. Some die roll results directly dictate what the robot will do. Some results will make the robot mimic your actions. Some will make the robot take a preferred action, which depends on the robot's starting world. So basically you get to play against 9 different robots, depending on what the start world of the robot is.

Rules for the robot are rather convoluted at first. They are not like the rules for the human player at all. You still play as normal, but when it is the robot's turn to carry out actions, you do them for the robot in a very different way. There are parallels to what a human player does, but to me it was like learning a new game. The robot has a concept of credit, which is roughly equivalent to how many cards a player has in hand. The robot does have a "hand" of cards, but it uses it to search for the appropriate card (dev, 6-cost dev, regular world, or military world) to build, not for paying for the build. The robot has a concept of economy size, which is roughly equivalent to how many points a human player can earn by doing Consume. The difficulty of the solo game is adjusted by using the 6-cost development tiles (not cards), which is yet another new thing. The robot has 1 to 3 of these, each worth 6 or 9 points, depending on the difficulty level you want to play at. These tiles can be built by the robot quite easily (in my opinion) during the game, during the Develop phase (of course).

So, as you play, you also manage the robot actions, and you race against the robot. The game ends in the same way as human-vs-human games - victory point chips exhausted, or 12 cards built.

Having played about 10 solo games now, my first impression was the robot is rather dumb. There is sometimes no logic to the robot's "choices". Such "choices" are just random die roll results after all. Sometimes it feels that the robot is not making sense at all, "picking" an action that does not benefit it at all. Also it seems just very stupid to have 6-cost development cards worth 0 points. Why bother building it? Then I started to see that the robot is not really meant to be intelligent. "Robot" does not necessarily equal "Artificial Intelligence". The robot was designed to mimic a human player, or rather to mimic what a human player can achieve in a typical game of Race for the Galaxy. I say this because the robot is following very different rules to achieve it. Playing against the robot feels very different from playing against a human. It is more about managing risk and calculating probabilities (i.e. outcome of the die rolls) rather than guessing your opponent's intentions and guessing what his/her long-term strategy is.

To beat the robot you need to understand how it works, and you need to understand how to exploit its limitations, or at least know how to minimise the chances of indirectly helping it. Knowing that sometimes it "copies" your actions, you need to think twice before selecting Consume x 2 if the robot's economy size is 5 (i.e. it would score 10VP if it also does Consume x 2). The robot's main ways of scoring are the 6-cost development tiles and the victory points. I find that usually it doesn't score much from worlds or normal developments. The 6-cost dev tiles (as opposed to dev cards) are a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level. The robot most of the time will be able to play all of its 6-cost dev tiles, unless you are really really quick in ending the game. So when you decide to play with 1 6VP tile (easy), 2 6VP tiles (medium) or 3 9VP tiles (hard), you are more or less already deciding that the robot will at least have 6VP / 12VP / 27VP.

You need to watch the robot's economy size closely. To me, it's kind of a countdown timer. The robot's economy will grow, sometimes quickly sometimes not, and the bigger it grows, the more dangerous it will be. You cannot allow it to do Consume too many times, especially when its economy size is big. It can earn lots of VPs this way, and also end the game very quickly by exhausting the VPs.

In contrast, the robot playing cards into its tableau is a mostly random affair. When doing Develop or Settle, the robot just develops or settles the first card of the right type as you flip through its draw deck. The robot doesn't choose which card to play. Most of the time the robot is slower to play cards into the tableau, and normally it doesn't score lot from these cards played, especially the 6-cost development cards. But of course sometimes when the robot is lucky it will keep drawing and settling the big worlds, or it will develop a 6-cost development card which jives with its tableau well.

Correction, 28 Dec 2008. 6-cost dev cards played by the robot count as 6VP or 9VP, depending on the difficulty level, and do not score according to the special text on the cards. Thanks crushedguava for pointing this out.

One more difference between robot-vs-human and human-vs-human is you get to see many more cards, because you help the robot flip through its deck, and you can take the opportunity to see what cards have appeared. This can be useful, but I'm not quite at the level of expertise yet to make good use of this information or to do card counting.

One tiny detail that I recently discovered - the hand icons on the robot playmat (left) are different from the hand icons on the player action cards (right). Actually you don't need to use the player action cards when you play solo. The robot hand has sharp edges, and one thumb and three fingers. The human hand has rounded edges, and one thumb and four fingers.

A close-up for better comparison.

I am now playing against the medium difficulty robot. I win slightly less than half of the games. It gives me enough challenge. I still don't feel I have fully figured out all the tricks to beat it, but I'm enjoying the exploration. My view of the solo game is it is a worthwhile exercise if you set your expectations right. It won't replace human-vs-human games. It is something very different. I still prefer human-vs-human games, but the solo game is good enough that I'd pull it out now and then to challenge myself.

My summary: The robot is dumb, but it can still beat you.