Board Game of the Year 2017: Race for the Galaxy

[admin]

Well well, fancy seeing this game again. It may have only gotten Runner-Up in the Multiplayer GOTY award, but Rio Grande’s excellent port has secured the crown for the year’s...

http://www.pockettactics.com/articles/b ... he-galaxy/

[Mirefox]

I am curious how Race for the Galaxy qualifies as a board game where Through the Ages is considered a card game. The two are awfully similar in how they use cards to build tableaus; if anything, there are even more board game elements in TtA, since you have to manage different tracts with cubes. Aside from currency, Race for the Galaxy is literally a large deck of cards.

[Kirian42]

Right, what Mirefox says.

Barring expansions and a small pile of chits, RFTG is a pure card game.

TTA, meanwhile, includes a large board for tracking science/military/culture, as well as player boards for keeping track of blue and yellow cubes--not to mention the cubes themselves.

[Cgareth]

Ditto. There's some odd journalism going on here...

[EICJoe]

Hey guys,

Totally understand the confusion - I've fielded this question a couple of times already.

So, the system we implemented where we tag every game as a single genre was introduced back in April, but we do it manually every time which means that there's been some ad-hoc forming of policy in this as we've gone a long.

Through the Ages and Race for the Galaxy are prime example of this - When Through the Ages was reviewed, I don't think we actually had a 'board game' tag but like you say it can be identified as a card game. By the time RftG came along we'd created a boardgame tag and the decision was made to class ALL physical boardgame ports as 'Board games'.

The main point for this year's awards though was to make sure that a game just came under one category, which was achieved. We've been a bit inconsistent with the tagging, sure, but I don't think you can say we've got it 'wrong' (apart from that thing with Darkest Dungeon... but we don't talk about that... ).

We will do better for next year, at least in terms of consistency, but I'd rather we didn't detract from RftG's win by getting bogged down as to what get's tagged as what. At the end of the day, you guys still voted for it.