When I ran a boardgame Meetup, I hacked together a version of Race for the Galaxy suitable for 5 or 6 casual players for times when we had more attendees than usual. (If we had 7 players, we’d play 7 Wonders. If we had 8 or more, we’d combine two sets of Rise of Augustus to play as a group, before splitting into separate groups to play different games.)
While the Race expansions The Gathering Storm and Rebel vs. Imperium each provide a new player color to expand the number of players from the four supported by the base game, they also introduce new mechanics. The game is complicated enough for a group of players of varying abilities!
Accordingly, I took all the cards from each expansion that didn’t use the new mechanics and added them to the main deck.
After the first few plays of this variant, we noticed that the deck got really small as people used cards to mark production on their planets. I took a handful of plastic cubes in each color (blue, brown, green, yellow) for players to use to mark production instead. (This was before New Frontiers, the boardgame based on Race for the Galaxy, introduced using cubes for this purpose in 2018.)
Rather than deal players 6 cards and have them pick 4 (delaying the start of the game as people decided what to keep), I just dealt every player 5 cards as their opening hand.
This variant worked great for a long time, and I still recommend it. While The Gathering Storm and Rebel vs. Imperium are now out of print as standalone editions, you can purchase them along with The Brink of War as part of the bundle Expansion and Brinkmanship. You can also buy cubes specifically for use with Race for the Galaxy—see the Goods Upgrade Kit—though I just used plastic cubes from a counting set.
Photo credit: copyright 2017 by Dimitri, posted to BoardGameGeek, used by permission.
