GALACTIC EMPIRES: An Ambitiously Obtuse Scifi Card Game

In 2025 I started buying random packs of trading and game cards and quickly realized that I was finding a lot of inspirational and ambitious projects hiding away in the historical halls of the hobby. I share the wacky joy I find over on Packhunter TV on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with weekday pack openings and casual looks at this hobby with an enthusiastic and fun attitude.

It’s 1994 and your parents just let you start walking home from school on your own. You stop by the local card and comic shop and see a pack of cards with the large, golden words “Galactic Empires” that just looks so cool. It’s got space ships on it. It’s shiny. The shop merchant takes your money and lets you pick your pack from the display box. You’ve seen Magic: The Gathering cards and have always wanted to play one of these card games. You start to flip through your new cards.

“Space dragons molt every 1000 years, shedding their scales for a new, tougher set.” “The moon contains excessive iridium dust.” “Adds 1 tram to a unit.”

Galactic Empires came out in 1994 immediately after Magic: The Gathering’s initial release. Over the few decades of collectible card game history many terms and mechanics have become common place and have been refined enough that teaching these games have largely become fairly straight forward. In 1994 there was no historical gameplay data to draw from. Games were coming out with truly brand new mechanics with no historical data on what generally works and what doesn’t. Galactic Empires jumped into this new genre of games with the ambitious goal of grounding its setting and gameplay in hard science fiction. While the few sets of cards that came out are largely forgotten from a commercial/success stand point I would like to recommend any fan of CCGs to hunt around for a few packs of Galactic Empires and take a look through a window into how the now standardized formulas were invented in real time.

Companion Games published Galactic Empires until 1997 when the company went bankrupt. Players represented one of several alien races competing across a shared galaxy, with cards covering ships, crew, planets, technologies, and events. The hard sci-fi framing meant that mechanics tried to model things like time travel, base and resource management, and ship-to-ship combat with more granularity than its contemporaries. Companion Games was small, the rules were dense, and the game just never really caught the attention it needed to.

The main quirk you’ll notice when you read through these cards is that the text is doing a few things at once — It’s being flavorful and informative with regards to the setting and it’s trying to be rules text, explaining mechanically what the card does. That’s commonplace now, generally with “flavor text” on cards being in italics and at the bottom of the text box, after the rules text and only if space allows for it. The Galactic Empires team eventually started to italicize some of the flavor text but it never was consistent and these two functions of the text were never visually or grammatically different enough to feel cohesive. One card might have a paragraph explaining that this planet has two moons and Argonians really love to set up bases here because of the iridium dust which, when ionized, interacts with the gravity of the moon in such a way that transportation between the planet and the moons is possible with a very low energy cost. That paragraph will take up the entire available space on a card. Another card might have a similarly intimidating block of text taking up all of its space but this time it will start off pointing out that Mind Turning is the most powerful form of protection against spy beings and transition casually into rules text without missing a beat. Both cards look like they might be equally complex or rules heavy but one is entirely world building flavor text and the other only partially world building. The result is cards that feel like they were written by someone deeply committed to the fiction and secondarily concerned with whether anyone could parse through the cards enough to find an interest in the actual game. There are some other quick design elements to mention that are related: Many of these cards have no dedicated box that the text lives in and the cards have a wild amount of different colors and designs so there are some cases where the design of the card background and the black text of the card is down right difficult to try to read. This coupled with the dozen different symbols the game uses that aren’t really labeled on the cards (So keep your rule book near by or make a cheat sheet!) can really make some of these cards overwhelming to look at.

The only lens I can view Galactic Empires through is this: The obtuse wording and design missteps aren’t a flaw to laugh at. They are the most honest part of the game. The game was trying to be a hard scifi simulation and with that comes dense, jargon full explanations. A card that says “Destroy target creature” just ain’t interesting enough for Galactic Empires. You see, in Galactic Empires, if you want to destroy a crew member you’re gonna put some sort of alien infection on that crew member and he’s gonna die in a few turns unless it’s owner can allocate enough research points equal to the strength of the illness quick enough… And you’re gonna get a nice, meaty description of what the alien infection is doing to that crew members body. The reason this game didn’t work is because it’s probably a lot more fiction reading than it is playing and the goal of Galactic Empires was incompatible with this new medium that it was made for. At a quick glance it’s easy to chalk it up as a failure for being “confusing” but I think it’s a way more interesting story than just that.

I picked up a few booster boxes of different sets for pretty cheap. I’ve got a joyful ritual of taking a couple packs with me to work and on my lunch break I crack em open and see what’s inside. There is so much ambition to absorb from this game and, if you’re a player of CCGs, seeing such an early attempt at a complex card game before the terminology was formalized and the genre blew up like it would in the coming years is an absolute blast.