Assemble your own galaxy by building solar systems and populating them with planets, moons, and other celestial bodies.
What Is Point Galaxy?
Point Galaxy is a set collection game for 1 to 5 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 30 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $19 for a copy of the game. Although it’s a followup to Point Salad and Point City, it is not an expansion and you don’t need to be familiar with either of those to enjoy Point Galaxy. (The Kickstarter campaign is for two different titles—you can check out my review of Propolis here.)
Point Galaxy was designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich and published by Flatout Games with AEG, with illustrations by Dylan Mangini.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Point Galaxy Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- 5 Starting Sun cards
- 5 Player Aid cards
- 140 Planet/Space cards
- 24 Rocket tokens
- Scorepad
Kickstarter backers will also get a mini-expansion included that has 4 more rocket tokens.
The bulk of the game is the cards, which are double-sided. The planet side has a slightly lighter background and always has a planet on it; the space side may have a sun, moon, asteroid, or wormhole, though the bulk of the cards are suns. Planets are numbered from 1 to 7 and have either one or two colors (though there are some grey planets with an X instead of a number), and there are five total colors in the game. The suns and moons are just labeled “sun” and “moon,” but each planet has a unique name, which is kind of fun.
Each of the colors also has a particular pattern associated with it, used in a little icon in the top left corner of the card, which is intended to help for those who have issues with color vision. We did find, however, that sometimes it was a little confusing: the pattern on the icon indicates color, but the larger illustration of the planet in the center of the card often uses a different pattern—because those appear to be associated with the number. It’s possible that some of this may get changed before the final product, though, so hopefully in the finished game everything will be easily identifiable.
The rocket tokens are small cardboard tokens, and each one has a particular scoring condition on the back—for the most part the iconography is easy to figure out, though there is a page of clarifications in the rulebook that goes over all of them in detail.
How to Play Point Galaxy
You can download a draft of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points by arranging various celestial bodies in your galaxy.
Setup
Shuffle all of the cards together and remove a number based on the player count. Then divide the rest into three roughly even stacks, space-side-up, and reveal two cards from each stack in columns below the stacks, planet-side-up, forming a market of 6 cards.
Mix up the rocket tokens and draw a number based on the player count. Place these face-up near the card market and return the rest to the box.
Give each player a player aid card—one of them is marked with a starting player icon and that player goes first. Give each player a random starting sun card (marked with an S), which is placed on the table in front of them to start their galaxy.
Gameplay
On your turn, you take two cards from the market one at a time and add them to your galaxy (a tableau area in front of you), without flipping them over. Once collected, cards may never be flipped over to the other side. At the end of your turn, flip cards from the stacks to refill the columns as needed.
Your galaxy will consist of a number of solar systems—each solar system can have at most one sun and one asteroids card, and below that a vertical sequence of planets, moons, and wormholes. Whenever you add cards to a solar system, it must go at the top or bottom of the sequence, never inserted in between cards. Any card except asteroids can be used to start a new solar system.
Here’s a look at the various cards and how they work.
Suns: The sun is placed above the solar system sequence, and will score points for things that are in its solar system. For instance, your starting sun will give you points for each set of two specific colored planets.
Asteroids: Asteroids must be tucked behind a sun, and each sun card can only have one asteroids card. At the end of the game, asteroids will score points for the players who have the most asteroids cards.
Planets: All of the planets in your solar system must be in a sequence that goes from lowest to highest or highest to lowest, so once you’ve placed your second planet in a system, all the other planets you add will need to go in the same direction even if there are other non-planet cards in the sequence. “X” planets can count as any number.
Moons: Moons show either one or two colors on them—they will score if they are placed adjacent to planets of the matching colors. (For the two-color moons, they must be sandwiched between planets of those two different colors.)
Wormholes: Wormholes reset the number sequence, letting you create a second number sequence of planets on the other side of the wormhole.
There are two other features that may appear on cards: rockets and research symbols. Every time you have accumulated 5 rocket icons in your entire galaxy, you get to take one of the rocket tokens, which will score points if you meet the conditions by the end of the game.
Research symbols are the little pennants at the top right of some cards, and they are labeled from A to G. You will get points for collecting different research symbols.
Game End
The game ends when there aren’t enough cards to refill the market. (Note that if one of the stacks runs out, divide the biggest remaining stack in half to make a new stack—the game only ends when there aren’t enough total cards in the stacks.) Everyone will have taken 13 turns.
- Suns score based on the specified sets within their own solar systems.
- Asteroids score points based on who has the most, second most, and third most—in case of ties, you add up the points for the tied places and split them as evenly as possible.
- Each solar system will score between 1 and 12 points based on how many different planet numbers are present in that system. Repeated numbers (possible with wormholes) do not score again.
- Moon cards score their points if they are adjacent to the correct planets.
- Score between 1 and 12 points based on how many different research symbols you’ve collected across your entire galaxy.
- Rocket tokens score based on their specific conditions.
The player with the highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most total rockets.
Why You Should Play Point Galaxy
Point Galaxy sits in a nice spot between the original Point Salad and its immediate successor Point City, going back to the quick-pick card-drafting but providing more complexity in the set collection and scoring options. One of the things that made Point Salad one of our favorites back in 2019 (aside from the dad joke title) was how snappy it was: on your turn, you took one or two cards and that was mostly it. One side had vegetables, and the other had all of the scoring conditions for the veggies, so you had to figure out the balance between getting scoring opportunities and finding the cards to fulfill those conditions. (Not to mention being careful about conditions that would cost you points!)
Point City was a couple steps up in complexity: the card-drafting was from a larger grid and you had to take cards adjacent to each other, and you had to collect resources (one side of the cards) in order to build buildings (the other side of the cards). Scoring opportunities came from some of the buildings, but particularly by completing the civic buildings to get the scoring tokens. I enjoyed Point City but it felt like a big jump from Point Salad.
Point Galaxy goes back to something more like the original card-drafting (the difference is that you always take two cards no matter where they come from), and the sun cards are a little bit like the original scoring conditions. However, the solar systems mean that you have to organize the cards you collect into groups, which can have various effects on the scoring. The rocket tokens are like the civic tokens from Point City: additional scoring opportunities if you can meet their conditions.
Grouping the cards into solar systems means there are more considerations when you choose cards. Ideally, you want to hit 7 unique numbers in every solar system to maximize the points, but you also want to collect the specific features that match the sun. Plus it doesn’t hurt to have a few moons in there for extra points. Wormholes generally aren’t points on their own, but they help you fill in numbers that you skipped over earlier, and may have other features like rockets or research symbols. I like the fact that the more central numbers tend to have fewer bonuses like rockets, where as the numbers at the end, 1 and 7, will often have more rockets—if you play one of those, then you’ve finished off that end of your number line, so the timing is important.
Each player is mostly playing their own game—you can’t directly interact with another player’s galaxy. However, the asteroids are a race for the most, so it’s important to keep an eye on how many asteroids other players have. And, of course, there’s good ol’ hate-drafting, where you can take cards from the market that you know will help your opponents. As in Point Salad, it’s also possible to keep somebody from getting a particular card by taking a different card from that column, so it flips over. Don’t want your rival to gain an asteroid but you don’t have room for one yourself? Take a planet from that column, and the asteroid will get flipped over at the end of your turn. (Of course, if the next card revealed is also an asteroid, then that’s just bad luck for you.)
Since you can start a solar system with just about any card, you can also gamble a little—create a solar system that’s all green and blue planets, and hope that you’ll find a sun that scores for those colors! There are also suns that will score for research tags, rockets, or wormholes, so you can try to build up a system that scores well for the planets and moons first, and wait for the right sun to show up later. As with Point Salad, there are a bunch of different things in Point Galaxy that score points, and it’s hard to maximize all of them at once, so a large part of the game is figuring out how to make do with what’s available on your turn, knowing that sometimes you may have to go in a different direction if the stars don’t align.
Overall, I’ve really been enjoying Point Galaxy and the way it captures a lot of the feel of Point Salad but ramped up just a bit. If you’re a fan of the original, it’s definitely worth checking out!
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Point Galaxy Kickstarter page!
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.
