Teachability, my whole thing, is where this game genuinely earns its reputation, and not in a flattering way at first. Every card is dense with tiny iconography instead of explanatory text, the logic being you shouldn’t need to read a paragraph every turn once you know the symbols, but getting to “once you know the symbols” is a real climb. My first game took ninety minutes and consisted mostly of staring at my own tableau while other people did things I didn’t understand. That’s a real, common complaint, more than one player describes teaching this to a new group as “a bit of a bitch,” even people who ultimately love the game.
Here’s the thing though, and it’s why I kept coming back after that rough first session: once it clicks, it really clicks, and multiple people describe almost the exact same conversion experience I had, a sudden, almost physical shift from confusion to seeing the whole engine at once. It’s a tableau-builder in the Puerto Rico/San Juan lineage, everyone selects a role each round and everyone benefits from whatever role gets picked, but Race compresses that into a genuinely elegant single deck of cards with no board at all, which is remarkable given how much strategic depth is packed into it.
Setup and teardown, unusually for something this strategically dense, is almost nothing, a shuffle and a deal, and a full game plays in twenty to thirty minutes once your group actually knows what they’re doing, which is a real point in its favor for a Tuesday-night slot once you’re past the learning wall.
Where the game earns its sharpest criticism, and where I think the critique is fair even though I still love it, is the multiplayer-solitaire problem. Because your tableau and your choices are so self-contained, a real contingent of players describe games where they barely look at what anyone else is doing beyond which role got picked, more group solitaire than an interactive card game, and I’ve had sessions that felt exactly like that, especially early on before I understood how much the role selection itself is a form of interaction. There’s also a real, not-nothing colorblind accessibility complaint about the card borders and symbol coloring that I think the design should have solved better given how iconography-dependent the whole system is.
Four stars. This is a genuinely brilliant, tightly engineered engine-builder that rewards the climb it demands of you, but it demands a real climb, and I wouldn’t put this in front of a table that wants an easy first-time win. Teach it to people who already like Puerto Rico or San Juan and have patience for symbol-reading, and it becomes one of the most replayable, fastest-playing deep games on the shelf. Teach it cold to a skeptical group and you risk losing them at the ninety-minute-confused-first-game stage before they ever see what the fuss is about.