Theming: What’s the point?
Build the highest-scoring seven-card hand from Galaxy and Mission cards. Galaxy cards are the characters, places, equipment, and artefacts that supply attributes and bonuses; Mission cards are scoring challenges. Everything is evaluated only against cards in your own final hand.
How a hand tells a story
- Galaxy cards have a Type, possibly one or more Specialties, a Lifeform, an Affiliation, and scoring text. Mission cards have scoring text only.
- You may finish with one or two Mission cards, never none or more than two.
- A card that is blanked scores no points, grants no points, and has no effect, but still occupies one of your seven hand slots.
Setting up: How to get started?
Shuffle the 50-card Galaxy deck and 24-card Mission deck separately. Deal every player five Galaxy cards and two Mission cards. Put both decks facedown beside a shared, initially empty discard area; choose a starting player at random and play clockwise.
Table checklist
- Keep the Galaxy and Mission decks separate throughout the game.
- Spread all discarded cards face up so every player can inspect the whole discard area, not just its most recent card.
- Each player begins with seven cards and two Missions. The score pad is needed only after the end trigger.
Rounds and Phases
There are no rounds or phases: players take one turn at a time until the shared discard area contains either eight Galaxy cards or twelve Mission cards. A turn always ends with seven cards in hand and one or two Mission cards.
Turn sequence
- Choose exactly one option: take one card from the discard area, then discard a different card; draw the top Galaxy card, then discard any card; or draw the top two Mission cards, then discard any two cards.
- Discards go face up into the shared discard area. The cards taken from it can be Galaxy or Mission cards.
- Check your Mission count after discarding. You may not end with zero Missions or with more than two.
- The game ends immediately once the discard area reaches eight Galaxy cards or twelve Mission cards. Finish the current turn’s required discards before scoring.
Reading card text
- WITH grants the bonus once if at least one named card or attribute is present.
- FOR EACH grants the stated bonus once for every qualifying card.
- A single card may grant bonuses to several cards, but it cannot grant the same receiving card more than one bonus, even if it matches several requested criteria.
- Resolve BLANKS and BLANKED UNLESS WITH first. A blanked card cannot score, give bonuses, or affect the hand in any way.
Scoring
At game end, score every non-blanked card in each player’s seven-card hand, including Mission cards, according to its text and the other cards in that hand. Do not compare or combine players’ hands.
Scoring order
- Identify cards blanked outright or blanked unless their stated condition is present.
- Ignore those cards completely, except that they still count towards the seven-card hand size.
- Add the values and conditional bonuses of every remaining Galaxy and Mission card, applying the one-bonus-per-giving-card restriction.
- The highest total wins; tied players share victory.
Terminology
- Galaxy card: A card with attributes and scoring text.
- Mission card: A text-only card that scores as part of the final hand.
- Type, Specialty, Lifeform, Affiliation: Galaxy-card attributes that card text can require or reward.
- Blanked: A card that neither scores nor has any effect, while still taking a hand slot.
- With / For Each: Respectively, a one-off conditional bonus and a bonus repeated for each qualifying card.
Official rules
The scoring examples in the rulebook are useful for checking unusual combinations of attributes and blanking.