Nexum Galaxy Review

Is 3 X's enough X's?

Nexum Galaxy advertises itself as a 3X game where you can expand, exploit, and exterminate (there's an expansion to add explore). Each player chooses to play any of the four factions and they can either use one of the pre-made map layouts in the rulebook or you can go rogue and create your own galaxies. There's so many combinations. On your turn, you can either move, produce energy, or add new ships to your fleet based on which of the four cards you choose to play. When you move, you spend a specific amount of energy depending on how far you move. Generating energy will give you one energy for each planet you control or two for any stars. You spend that energy to move or add more ships to the fleet. Combat is very simple. When you move, if you go to a planet that is occupied by another player, you trigger it. The player with the highest value will win. Each ship counts for one and if the defender has any ships on the star then the value increases by one. This will happen often. The game ends by winning enough battles or by collecting enough relics. Whoever has the highest score will win.

The Good: There is pretty much zero randomness to this game. Unless you're building your own map, which even still isn't exactly random, you'll always know what you have and what everyone else has. This allows you to form a strategy that works in your favor and pivot if you need to. It's a great intro to the 4X genre. It comes in a small box and can be contained to a relatively small table. Because of this, setup time is also really quick.

The Okay: The game is pretty simple, you only have 4 cards and there's only 2 symbols to use (2 have single symbols and 2 have combinations of the two). It also felt difficult to get energy. I couldn't form a good strategy to do it at least.

The Not So Good: I wish that there was ways to upgrade your ships outside of the relics. If you don't play a game with them then you'll just have equal ships to everyone else. That or more powerful endgame types of ships would have been cool to see. The rulebook definitely left me a bit confused. I keep saying it's a simple game but the rulebook definitely didn't make it feel like it was. Some of the concepts were a bit confusing and I wish there were some more diagrams or if it was simpler to read.

Overall: 6/10

Nexum Galaxy isn't a bad game by any means. It's a small box that serves as a great introduction to epic 4X games. I love that the game can be setup in countless ways and you can form your own stories but in the end it just fell a bit flat for my tastes. If I'm going to play a game like this, I think I would rather play Eclipse (I can't speak to TI4, but probably that too). I would recommend this game if you're someone that may be a bit intimidated by the epic space odyssey games and want to ease yourself into them.

Thanks to Draco Ideas for supplying me with a review copy.