What’s the best modern strategy card game?

If you said anything other than 'Race for the Galaxy,' I have some news for you—you’re wrong. (We’d also accept Magic, but that’s a whole other thing).

They are relatively cheap. Get one that is USB3 even if you don’t have USB3 on your MacBook. That way it will work much faster in the future when you do have a USB3 MacBook. Then transfer them directly from one to the other using the card reader in one USB slot and the thumb drive in another. Drag and drop in the Finder.

Race for the Galaxy, a game where players compete to build the most powerful galactic empire in the shortest amount of time, is the quintessential modern card game. Released in 2007, the game has solidified its 'classic' status due to its complex strategy, clever interactivity, and infinite replayability. It’s a truly great game.

But there’s a problem: Race for the Galaxy is notoriously difficult to teach. Its core mechanics can feel unintuitive to new players, and the game’s generous use of initially inscrutable iconography makes it such a chore to teach that it’s almost not worth trying to bring new players into the fold unless you’re sure they’re going to love it.

In 2014, Race designer Tom Lehmann and co-designer Wei-Hwa Huang released Roll for the Galaxy, a dice-game take on the Race formula. Roll for the Galaxy’s tiles—the game's analogue to Race’s cards—were still emblazoned with all manner of arcane iconography, but the symbols were also accompanied by text explainers, making Roll a much easier game to teach. (It also happens to be an excellent game, and it’s where we’d suggest starting if you want to dip your toes into the Race universe.)

But say the relatively short playtimes of Race and Roll are still too long for you. Say you want to build and rule over a galactic empire... in the time it takes to make a sandwich. Enter Lehmann’s newest title, Jump Drive, a game that’s billed as an “introduction to the Race for the Galaxy universe.” You can think of it as a sort of ultra-fast, super-simple distillation of the core concepts found in its bigger siblings.

Go ahead and jump

The goal of Jump Drive, as in every “___ for the Galaxy” game, is to conquer the galaxy through clever cardplay. Here, players race to cross a 50-point threshold, at which point the game is over and the highest score wins. The game generally lasts a brisk seven-or-so rounds.

Jump Drive Card Game Cheat Sheet Free

Jump Drive keeps the wildly addictive “engine-building” gameplay from the other games in the series while shrugging off any rules that can’t be explained in seconds. From a starting hand of five cards, you’ll piece together a card-drawing, point-generating machine that propels you to victory.

Each turn, players simultaneously and secretly choose to play either one or two cards face down in front of them. When everyone is ready, players flip up their cards, which stay in front of them, making a “tableau” for the rest of the game. Cards come in two types, ”worlds” and “developments”—essentially planets you can take over and technologies you can develop to help you take over planets more efficiently. Each card has a cost, which you pay by discarding other cards from your hand. Each card, then, represents one of two options—an addition to your empire or the currency to pay for those additions.

If you play two cards, you have to pay full price for each. But if you play only one card, you get a bonus—a discount or a refund, depending on the type of card you're playing. Since the game is a race, you want to quickly play as many cards as possible, but that gets expensive. You'll have to decide whether you can afford to discard that one perfect card to get that other perfect card into your empire this round. The decision is often excruciating, an essential design element ported over from Race.

At the end of each round, everyone gets two types of income—cards and points. Every card tells you what it gives you, and these values snowball as the game progresses. In round 1, you might draw 2 cards and score 1 point; a brief six rounds later, you could be scoring 20 points per round and drawing a huge stack of cards (to keep things balanced, you have to discard down to 10 at the end of the round).

Jump Drive Card Game

Although the mechanics are completely different, this sense of absurd escalation from 'I have nothing' to 'I'M THE UNSTOPPABLE RULER OF THE GALAXY' reminds me of Star Realms, another super-quick sci-fi card game. It's tremendously satisfying.

If you need your files to be stored somewhere outside of your Windows 10 computer for safekeeping, a flash drive is a good option. Follow these simple steps to copy files to or from a flash drive:

Free Game Cheat Sheets

1. Insert the flash drive into one of your computer’s USB ports.

   Laptops, like cameras, often have a slot for a memory card. Want to turn your memory card into a flash drive? Simply buy a device called a dedicated or single-purpose memory card reader. Strictly speaking, a multipurpose card reader also works, but multicard readers cost more and are often larger than single-card readers. In addition, a dedicated memory card reader doesn’t need a cable to connect a camera to a computer. You can just download your pictures to your hard drive from the card.

2. If Windows 10 displays a notification when you insert the flash drive or memory card, select Open Folder to View Files, which will open File Explorer on the desktop. If File Explorer doesn’t open automatically, go to the desktop and then select the yellow folder icon in the taskbar to open File Explorer.
3. In File Explorer, navigate on the left to the folder that contains the files you want to copy. Select the folder.
4. On the right side of File Explorer, select the folder or file you want to copy.If you see a check box to the left of each object you want to copy, you can select each check box to copy multiple files simultaneously.

   To select every object on the right simultaneously, use the Select All button on the Home tab. You can also select the files you don’t want to copy and then use the Invert Selection button on the Home tab; deselected files become selected and vice versa. You can select files in other ways as well.

5. The keyboard shortcut to select all files in File Explorer is Ctrl + A.
6. In the Ribbon, select the Home tab and then select the Copy To button. Select Choose Location from the menu that appears.

   You can move files if you want them gone from their original location. To do so, select the Move To button. Follow the remaining steps, but substitute the word Move for Copy.

7. In the Copy Items window, under the This PC heading, locate the flash drive or memory card.The drive will not be Local Disk (C:), where Windows 10 resides. Select the removable flash drive or memory card to which you want to copy the files and then select the Copy button. If the files copy quickly, you may not see any indication of progress; otherwise, a progress bar is displayed until copying is complete.

   If you select your user name in the Copy Items dialog box, you may see OneDrive listed in the expanded list. Files you copy to OneDrive are automatically copied to the cloud and to linked computers.

8. If you copy a file that is already on the destination disk, the Replace or Skip Files window appears. (Perhaps you’re copying a newer version of a file you copied before.) Note the available options:
   • Replace the File in the Destination: Selecting this option replaces one file with another. Be certain that you don’t need the replaced file (as you might if you want to keep different versions of files).
   • Skip This File: Selecting this option does nothing with this file.
   • Compare Info for Both Files: Selecting this option opens another window in which you can select files on the left to replace those on the right, and select files on the right to keep. Selecting the same file on the left and right creates a second file with a number added to the name, such as myfile (2). This option enables you to have the original and the new file.
9. Select one of the previous options. If you selected Compare Info for Both Files, select the files to replace or skip, and then select the Continue button.You may or may not see a progress indicator, depending on how quickly the files are copied.
10. Confirm that the copy worked by navigating on the left to the location you selected as the destination in Step 6.If the files are there, congratulations; you’re done. If not, try Steps 4 through 6 again.
11. Remove the flash drive or memory card you inserted in Step 1. You’re good to go.

    If you have files or folders that you’d be devastated to lose, follow the steps in this task to create backup copies of those items on a portable storage device. Then keep that device in a safe place.

    To copy files from a flash drive or memory card, follow these same steps but select the flash drive in Step 3 and the folder or other destination to which you want to copy or move files in Step 6.