Age of Galaxy

Set up the game by placing public boards and five random system cards face down, with an exploration token on the first one. Draw three trade cards and place them face up above the action board alongside reference cards. Each player receives a player board, reference card, tokens, action cubes, ships, and seven faction cards. Players choose up to three faction cards to keep in their alliance, discard the rest up to seven, and gain initial resources matching their chosen human faction symbols. Set the credit marker to zero and production marker to three on player boards. For different player counts, place exploration and planet tokens, and leave unneeded spaces empty on trade cards and the galactic congress card.

The main objective of Age of Galaxy is to prove that your empire is the most worthy by accumulating the highest number of victory points over five rounds. Players achieve this by forming powerful alliances of alien factions, exploring new planetary systems, colonizing worlds, manufacturing cruiser fleets, researching advanced technologies, and dominating in galactic conflicts and trade.

Each of the five rounds consists of four phases: Production, Action, War (skipped in round one), and Galactic. In Production, players take three action cubes and advance their production marker. During the Action phase, players take turns spending action cubes to perform actions like colonizing, manufacturing, exploring, retrieving, trading, nominating, and researching, or they can use free actions and faction abilities. The War phase compares player fleet strengths to determine the overlord and distribute rewards and planet control. Finally, the Galactic phase moves the fleet marker and triggers golden ages or prestige tracking.

Scoring happens at the end of the fifth round based on four main sources: Prestige points tracked on the player board, galaxy bonuses for basic and developed colonies, relics worth one victory point each, and major ideologies from your alliance's faction cards. Different ideologies offer specific bonuses, such as points for advanced technologies, planet types, developed colonies, or relics. Ties are broken by prestige.

The game concludes automatically at the end of the fifth round once the galactic fleet marker reaches the final system card and cannot move any further. After this final galactic phase, players proceed directly to the final scoring step to determine the ultimate winner of the galaxy.