When it comes to board games, it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a development and a regression. Take Galactic Renaissance, Christian Martinez’s followup to his supernal war-and-politics game Inis. On the surface, it covers much the same ground as that previous title, full of aggressive peacetimes, ill-advised conflicts that leave one poorer even in victory, and intersecting interests that are too testy to call alliances. Even the game’s geography, those far-flung planets only connected via warpgates, the way their abilities are contested and claimed, calls to mind the island terrain of its predecessor.

But this is no Inis. Despite riffing on many of the same ideas, Galactic Renaissance is a pockmarked experience, uneven in its best moments and frustrating and over-long the rest of the time. At its worst, it feels like a half-completed prototype for its predecessor.

A union of prosperous colleagues.

The future, as it turns out, is crowded. A handful of far-flung alien species have stumbled across a series of connective warp gates, a spiderweb network that bridges untold worlds. At their heart lies the Hub, a single planet with access to all three of those color-coded gates. The whole thing is reminiscent of the lore of Mass Effect, but it’s an effective hook. Little by little, your species ventures outward, uncovering new planets and contesting over those that have already been mapped. There’s little room for outright warfare — and any battles are coded as diplomatic efforts, in which emissaries are sent home rather than viciously disemboweled — but there will be plenty of jostling for space. Like feuding houses in our own Renaissance, no one species is capable of overwhelming the others.

Instead, you must navigate a shifting set of victory conditions. This is the beating heart of Galactic Renaissance, reminiscent of the goals in Inis thanks to the overlapping interests they produce and their sometimes hard-to-understand nature, but separated by a degree of sheer fickleness that can only be described as infuriating. Drawn at random, the game opens with two available; as points are earned, eventually a third is revealed and the first two are swapped for new options.

They’re also a pain in the butt to comprehend, with such an exact degree of complexity that their shifting nature requires constant reminders to keep abreast of the political situation. One straightforward option might announce that you will earn one victory point for “Each SHARED Planet with a RED Portal where you are PRESENT.” Okay, not so bad. But how about the one that promises two victory points for “Each SHARED Planet with at least one INSTITUTE where you are INFLUENT.” Ah, now we’re cooking. Galactic Renaissance speaks its own language, and it’s a tongue that only occasionally deigns to permit easy reading. “Influent” means you’re tied for the most “elements” on a planet. “Strong,” far from meaning, you know, strong, means you have exactly two elements on a planet. Allied planets are different from planets where you are leading; institutes and foundations are obviously very different sorts of structures; “twin portals” does not mean three portals. Now put three of these objectives side by side. Now swap out one of those for a different one. Neck-craners, prepare thine necks for craning.

Life goals. Also game goals.

Victory in Galactic Renaissance is about chasing these objectives. Moreover, it isn’t enough to simply pursue one or two of them. No, there comes a point in the development of a stellar potentate that they will have to consider every tool in their arsenal at once. When the game begins, meeting an objective is a simple thing. When you send a senator to the Hub, you trigger scoring. Congratulations, you now have more points than you had before.

But your ultimate objective is to reach 30 points. And around the game’s halfway to two-thirds mark, everybody’s progress shudders to a stop. That’s because your actual points are capped at 20. Anything over that number will drop back down at the end of your turn. To truly win, you need to hit 30 within the span of a single turn. That means scoring ten points all at once.

Leaving aside the precise composition of victory conditions, which might make such an endeavor either trivial or very difficult indeed, this means that a number of planetary bodies need to achieve syzygy. Your place in the galactic fold must be well established, ready to meet those victory conditions. Your hand must be carefully curated. Your hand limit, one of the game’s strictest impositions, must be upgraded. Perhaps most frustratingly, you need to draw and play your senator card at exactly the right moment. The result is a degenerative state in the final act; clever politicking goes out the window, and in its place comes the fastest churn you can manage. Every session I’ve played has come down to a sloppy footrace to see who can first draw the proper cards.

To be clear, this is no random process. Rather than functioning as a regular deck-builder, cards in Galactic Renaissance are approached deterministically. Apart from the game-opening shuffle and the occasional interruption from a rival, every time you use a card it will be placed on the bottom of your deck. Over the course of the game, then, their order may be managed. Advisors and specialists with complementing effects can appear together, while those that are useful in moments of diplomatic unrest can be seeded throughout one’s deck to protect your emissaries from disruption.

The cards do the heavy lifting. Also, the game-breaking.

Except this procession is rarely as orderly as one might hope. Turns unfold as you play cards. Early on, this usually means only one card, giving the game a piecemeal progression. Later, specialist cards and planetary effects permit you to bounce multiple actions off of one another, accomplishing far more in a single turn. The pacing is wonky; a turn could last five seconds or five minutes depending on how many of those specialists you’ve crammed into your deck. But as a general blueprint to build a starship around, it’s functional enough.

But one’s cards are often stronger determiners of your fate than you might hope. It isn’t a problem that they’re unbalanced. Quite famously, Inis was chock-full of imbalanced cards. But those were carefully assigned, whether by draft, territory control, or, in that game’s more random case, drawn at great pains from a deck of special powers. More importantly, they were temporary. Any card could only be used once, forcing players to carefully choose their battles.

By contrast, the cards in Galactic Renaissance are permanent additions to your deck. When it comes to Disorder, the game’s euphemism for battle, some of them are downright nasty. Under normal circumstances, everybody at the planet in question chooses whether to lose an emissary, retreat two emissaries to a home planet, or raze one of their precious institutes. If the planet has been brought down to a sustainable population, the Disorder ends; if not, another round is inflicted on everybody there.

Certain cards upset this order. Those who have played Inis will recognize this for a near-replica of the combat system there. Rather than losing one of your emissaries or institutes, you can instead play one of these disrupting cards. These have a range of effects: adding an emissary to the conflict rather than losing one, plopping down an institute, or maybe even concluding the fight in your favor altogether. Where Inis presented these moments as singular turning points, Galactic Renaissance sends them to the bottom of their owner’s deck — from whence they will reappear again and again, like some schoolyard bully coming after your lunch money every first recess.

Despite being tremendously disruptive, these specialist cards are drawn at random. There are ways to secure a better pick, often by drawing multiple cards and picking which one you’d prefer. But there’s still a galling degree of chance at play. Pulling the right cards, those that upend the usual process of Disorder or, worse, earn further specialists, will nearly always come out ahead. It surely doesn’t help that specialists universally award extra actions, as opposed to the starting cards. The problem is recursive. A lucky early specialist draw can be translated into a significant margin in short order.

Follow the Cosmic Rabbit.

That problem extends to nearly every corner of Galactic Renaissance. There simply isn’t a bone in this creature’s body that wasn’t grafted from its sturdier predecessor. The cards are still potent, but because they cycle through your deck rather than being drafted or spent, they’re spent flippantly rather than only after careful consideration. Combat resolves similarly, but without the possibility of negotiated peace it tends to result in straightforward eliminations rather than fostering the political situation the game desires elsewhere. Terrain works the same way — each planet has an attendant ability that can be secured — but these are flimsy and often forgotten by the game’s midpoint, with various planets coming across as interchangeable, no real comparison to the grudges that clans enact over Inis’s provinces. Victory is a hurdle to be vaulted, one that often displays some measure of kingmaking, but it’s a case of drawing the proper cards in order, hopefully after nobody has disrupted your play order, rather than requiring checkmate-style maneuvering. In nearly every regard, it comes across as a bastard child rather than an heir.

I was naturally curious to see how the medicine would go down with those who hadn’t experienced Inis. Martinez and Matagot pitched Galactic Renaissance as a spiritual sequel, but it’s an unenviable comparison regardless of who invoked it. So I put on a smile — I still enjoy playing titles I don’t like — and plunged a handful of newcomers into an icy bath of intergalactic politics.

To be sure, they didn’t share my tangible disappointment with Galactic Renaissance. But neither did they find much to be enthusiastic about. The victory conditions were just as tricky to parse, the conflicts just as persnickety, and the card system just as hidebound by its limitations and as confounded by powerful cards cycling through its decks. They were especially put off by the game’s final act, which featured multiple failed attempts to surmount that conclusive ten-point gap. All told, they discovered a game that pulls in directions that are more interesting than traditional dudes-on-a-map fare, but fails to realize any of those tangents. For such a lavish production, it’s a spindly thing.

Bigger sessions tend to be a muddle.

What more is there to say? Galactic Renaissance is perhaps the biggest disappointment of the year, an overburdened and poorly developed game of political intrigue that forgets to be intriguing or even all that political. As renaissances go, this one has me pining for the past.

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A complimentary copy of the base game was provided.