This game is big -- in scope, complexity, replayability, and both time and table space required. But it is worth every bit. There are very few board games out there that can match this one in what it does. Players play a particular faction or species in a galactic setting where the old empire has fallen and the strongest civilizations are vying for the imperial throne. The balancing is asymmetric - each faction (17 in the base game) has their own unique abilities, and while the units are more-or-less common across factions, there are particulars and abilities that make each fleet feel slightly different. The game board is built from a selection of hexagonal tiles, each representing a system in the galaxy. There are rules for building custom maps by dealing tiles to each player, or you can play from one of the premade maps included in the rulebook or on the Internet to give more balance in exchange for randomness. Starting from your home system, you'll expand your personal empire, exploring and collecting planets and resources along the way to fuel your economy. Strategic alliances and trading with other players, technological advancements, space and ground combats, and political machinations all combine together to allow players to score various public and secret objectives, worth various victory points. First person to 10 points (or 14, if you want a longer game yet) wins. But while victory points are the ultimate goal, the methods to get there can vary from game to game and faction to faction. Some factions are more suited to trade and economic growth, others to political maneuvering, others to warfare, and others are somewhere in between. Depending on the faction you play, the systems on the board, the action cards you're dealt, and the strategy cards you choose, the game is very fluid and ebbs and flows between exciting dice rolls and mundane matters of trade. The replayability of this game is astronomical (pardon the pun). So, some downsides. The first and most obvious is the time commitment. This is not a short game. A minimum of an hour per player is a good baseline for experienced players, but new people just learning can easily be double that. Plus there is extensive setup and teardown time. Proper storage and separation of pieces (and there are a LOT!) is an absolute must. Various tuckboxes, 3D printed trays, retail storage solutions, and the like exist across the Internet -- while the included plastic insert is okay, you're definitely going to want to invest in storage to make setup and teardown easier and faster. And then there are the pieces themselves. The plastic ships are excellent in detail, the cards are printed well with a glossy finish and good feel, and the cardboard components are thick with a sturdy heft and detailed colors. The size required, though ... you'll have a faction card (not quite US letter size), a command pool card (about half that size), planet cards, action cards, technology cards, ships and ground units ... and that's just the player-specific stuff. Common areas include the objectives and objective deck, political agenda deck, strategic action cards, generic tokens for infantry, fighter ships, and trade goods, and on and on. Then there is the game board itself, composed of several dozen tiles, with a six-player map about 2.5 ft in diameter. I have a dedicated gaming table with a 3 ft by 5 ft playing surface, and it's already getting real cozy with just four players. Add in additional players, or the Prophecy of Kings expansion, and you're going to need some TV trays or additional side tables to hold components. Again, solutions for this abound across the Internet -- whiteboards for objective scoring, playing card holders to shrink the horizontal space, etc. -- but it's yet another thing that's "required" and not included in the game. But, above all, this is an excellent heavy strategy game with a sizable commitment. If people go into this expecting Catan-in-space, they're going to be severely disappointed, severely frustrated, or both. With the time commitment, the space required, and the familiarity of rules necessary to exploit the game world to its fullest, this is the best game you'll never play.
