26/03/2026 Carnuta & Race For The Galaxy
This week we decided to play Carnuta and Race for the Galaxy, with the Expansion and Brinkmanship.
While the latter doesn’t really need any presentation nor explanation for many of you, the first is a new release you may not have yet come across, for which Repos Games sent us copies for review.
Our reviewed copy came with a very useful and functional neoprene playmat: at the time of writing, it’s not available for sale, but we hope to have it available later this year.
Carnuta is a 2-4 player game, which (officially) clocks at around 25 minutes.
We played it at 2 players and it took us good part of an hour including unboxing, punching, learning the rules and packing away. I’d say it’s realistic to play it under 30 minutes after your first game or two.
The art on the box and cards is easy on the eyes, and the components are of good quality.
Don’t let its appearance deceive you though: it can look like a simple game aimed at children (it is aged 10+), but Carnuta punches above its weight.
Packed in its small box there’s a good level of strategy and sweet decision points.
On your turn, you can perform 2 of 4 available actions: you can TAKE a card, PLAY a card, TAKE runes, or FLIP runes.
Without going too much into detail, runes are the game’s currency, and a clever system at that: they are double faced, showing the sun on one side and the moon on the other.
They are needed to buy ingredients (cards) for your potion.
You see, there are two types of ingredients: day ingredients and night ingredients, each requiring the correct side of the runes in order to be bought. Depending on the card’s cost, you will need to either flip or discard your runes.
The game ends as soon as one player plays their 11th card.
Using the included score pad, scoring is determined by counting the points provided by your ingredients, which can be straight victory points or requiring sets of different ingredients in order to trigger.
We enjoyed our game of Carnuta and would play it again as a good filler.
Scoring was pretty close, with the winner seizing the first spot by 4 points!
Our second game of the night was the always brilliant Race for the Galaxy with Expansion and Brinkmanship (one of our go-to games of late).
Tonight the winged goddess decidedly smiled at the sprawling and militarily powerful galactic empire that best managed to create its own luck. Clever combos allowed to quickly score the shared objectives and snatch a deserved victory!
Well done!
The winning side:
The losing side:
