Race for the Galaxy (RftG or R4TG) is a card game designed by Thomas Lehmann that was released in 2007 by Rio Grande Games. Its theme is the colonisation of planets. It accommodates 2-4 players; more players are possible through expansion packs.

The game uses iconography in place of language. While appreciated by experienced players for being concise, some new players may find the icons difficult to learn and decipher. The game won Boardgamegeek's Golden Geek Award for best card game, Fairplay Magazine’s À la carte award for best card game of 2008, and was described by the magazine Tric Trac as "LE jeu de cartes de cette année 2008" (THE card game of the year 2008).

The play style of the game is similar to that of another Rio Grande game, San Juan, which is the card game version of the board game Puerto Rico. Lehmann, Race's designer, developed his own card game version of Puerto Rico at the request of the publisher. Some of its ideas were incorporated in San Juan.

Later, Lehmann used those ideas to create a different game, one of space exploration and conquest rather than colonial development in the Caribbean. Each player builds an interstellar civilization that starts with only its home world in play and a hand of cards. Players strive to have the most victory points at game end; points are gained by settling new worlds, by developing new useful attributes for their civilization, and by consuming goods produced by their civilization's worlds.

Each card serves multiple purposes: cards represent the worlds and civilization "developments", cards are used as payment for playing a world or development (by sacrificing cards from a player's hand); finally face-down cards are used as tokens to represent the goods that worlds produce.

Similar to 0 things you like: