Dicing Your Way Through the Galaxy – Tiny Epic Galaxies Review

There’s something cool about games that have small boxes that you can cart around fairly easily, just sticking it in the back of your pack behind huge games like Speakeasy or something.

There’s also something cool about jetting through the galaxy, colonizing planets and robbing them of their resources, and also making sure they do something for you if you happen to bring them into your galactic empire.

Galaxies are huge! And who knew that we could each have our own?

Hence the name Tiny Epic Galaxies.

Tiny Epic Galaxies is a dice throwing game where you are trying to build up your galactic empire by adding colonies to it, because somehow you can drag planets into your own galaxy like they were a wayward child, maybe?

Or maybe they’re Schrodinger’s Planets and it’s not clear which galaxy they’re in until somebody claims them?

The game was designed by Scott Almes with artwork by William Bricker.

It was published by Gamelyn Games (which has apparently been absorbed by Tycoon Games) in 2015.

It’s actually a fairly simple game in concept, though for some reason it can be hard to really wrap your head around.

You build up your empire for points, you acquire planets for points.

As soon as somebody hits or passes 21 points, that triggers the end of the game.

Complete the round (and how are you supposed to tell who was first player with no first player marker??? I kid, I kid…) and then see who managed to actually get the high score after the endgame scoring cards.

How do you do all of that?

Let’s talk about it.

(Don’t forget that you can click on a picture to blow it up)

Each player has their own home galaxy card, where their ships are waiting to be sent out on missions.

The tracks record how many dice you can roll on your turn, how many ships you have, and how many points your empire is worth (up to 8 points).

The level tracker for your empire is the rightmost track.

It also has a track where you can know exactly how much energy and how much culture you have.

It all comes in a tiny little card…but it’s a galaxy, so it’s epic!

Players will be rolling their dice, getting one free reroll of however many dice they want to reroll. After that, each reroll costs an energy.

The dice will dictate your available actions on that turn.

The cool thing I really like about this game is that for each die that you use, everybody else gets a chance to spend a Culture and follow that action.

Thus, unless you’re out of Culture, you’re never just sitting their twiddling your thumbs.

You want to see what the other person is doing so you can decide whether you want to do the same thing.

The ship action will let you move a ship around to another planet (or back to your home galaxy).

You can land on the planet, which means you just take that planet’s action and be done, or you can orbit it to try and colonize it (because everybody knows if you orbit a planet long enough, you get to keep it).

You can also just gain energy or culture by seeing how many planets you have ships on with each respective symbol (your home galaxy has an energy symbol).

If you have orbited a planet, you can move your ship one space for each one of the appropriate symbols (either Diplomacy or Economy).

The big deal, though, is the Empire action die.

This allows you to spend the appropriate amount of energy or culture (not both!) and improve your empire.

This is how you get additional ships, additional dice, and make your empire worth more points.

The Empire action die will also allow you to trigger any of your colonized planets, because when you do colonize a planet, you put it underneath your home galaxy’s Empire action.

You do have to choose which one, you don’t get to do all of them with each die.

That’s another cool thing about improving your empire with colonies is that it adds to your choices.

Otherwise, maxing out your empire improvments would make that die ultimately useless.

The ability to follow actions is what really makes this game, though, because sometimes colonizing a planet is a race to see who can get to the end of the track first.

If it’s green’s turn and they have an Economy die, they can move forward one step on VICI-KS156, but blue can then follow that action and complete the colonization.

Unless blue is out of culture (they burned all of their art galleries or something), in which case they can’t follow and two Economy dice for green would give them the planet!

This makes the choices for other players that much juicier, because culture can be a limited quantity (unless you’ve somehow built up a culture engine).

You have to pick and choose when you follow an action because you don’t know what the future will bring.

If you’re in a 5-player game, you have one culture and the player to your left is doing something you might want to do, can you stand to go through three other players’ turns without being able to follow an action?

How important is this one?

Just stuff to think about and why this game can be a hit.

The follow ability does have a big downside, though, especially with larger player counts.

It can slow the game down to a slog.

Not only can each player’s turn take upwards of a few minutes (which is fine in a game like Lisboa, but in a little dice game like this, no matter how epic?), but it’s extended by how many people are actually following the action.

The game box says 30-45 minutes, and while I have done this game in 45 a couple of times, that’s been with 2-3 players.

Our last game at 5 players (granted, three people were learning it), it went over 2 hours.

Especially as you are getting down the stretch and people are min-maxing as much as they can (and then other players are doing that on the first player’s same turn, and then on their turn), it almost makes me want to claw my eyes out.

This can happen even early in the game if you end up having no culture and you literally cannot follow anybody.

You’re sitting around watching everybody else do their thing, feeling time dragging, while you can’t do anything.

I do like the hidden endgame scoring goals, because these can make or break a game if things are close.

In our last game, James hit 21 first and ended it, but I beat him because he didn’t get his goal and I did.

But Tartan went above 21 on his turn as well, and he edged me out by one point.

It is nice that in larger player counts, you can be tied for your goal and still get 2 points.

It’s a good concession to how difficult it can be to be ahead of everybody in something.

The production of the game is top notch, though nothing too noteworthy.

Everything’s chunky and easy to handle, it’s all compact with six dice, a huge bunch of cards, and a bunch of wooden bits and pieces.

It all fits nicely into the box.

It even has a dice tracker where you can place your action dice so that it’s clear to everybody which action you are doing (so it’s easier for them to see if they want to follow) and it also has a few rules to keep in mind.

It gives you what each symbol means, and it has the dice converter.

The only dice mitigation option (other than rerolling if you have enough energy) is that you can spend two dice to turn a third die to whatever face you want it to be.

Sometimes you need that.

Tiny Epic Galaxies is an enjoyable game as long as you don’t mind some luck involved.

It’s a dice game…there’s luck. If that’s a problem for you, why are you rolling dice?

Unfortunately, the game can drag to a halt way too often for this to be the relatively quick lunch time game that it probably should be.

Maybe some of that is a player issue?

Maybe.

But it’s something to be aware of and it is something that makes me want to play it less than I might otherwise.

It’s definitely a game worth giving a try if you can.

Just either play with fewer players or make sure you’ve budgeted some time.

(This review was written after 15 plays)