Using Rob's R4TG statistics, courtesy of Genie, I ran Glicko-2 on the home worlds. There has been enough games (>300 each) that the deviation is mostly in the same range, so I will leave them out.

These are all two-players, advanced.

No goals, The Gathering Storm:

Goals, The Gathering Storm:

For each of these ratings, the deviation is less than 30. This means that there's a 95% confidence that each of these ratings is within 60 of their true rating.

Race for the Galaxy is notoriously difficult to teach. Maybe not to motivated gamers, but the problem is that you need to sow the seeds for a few games before they hit that point where they just "get it" - seeing the possibilities with the game and start having fun.

Being one of the few people in my gaming group to enjoy and know Race, naturally I wanted to spread this. As with most games, the game really is quite a bit easier once you get going. To avoid being overwhelmed by the huge number of icons and wondered how they interact, and how someone moderately skillful (me) would dominate and demoralized, here is my approach. (This assumes we do a brief on the rules, with the emphasis on cost of a card and how to pay for it.)

Setup: I'm with 5 of my friends; I'm the only person that knows how to play.
Rules for game one:

1. No military worlds - everything is settled and paid for. The important part is going through the phases. On a second or third play, adding military to explain on phase 3 is simple once they understand the phases and the workflow of the game.
2. Chosen start world - I chose ELC for them. This is so at some point, you can teach "forced consumption".
3. No goals, takeovers, etc. - Probably obvious.
4. 2 players - I'm one player, all 4 of the friends are playing co-op. This way, if there are any questions, _everybody_ would pay attention, as this would affect all of them. Even better is that they learn all the icons at the same time, working out strategies together.
5. Go through every phase, every card on tableau - on every turn, we go through every phase - "did anyone choose phase one? did anyone choose phase two? etc". If someone did, we go through every card on the phase to ask if they have any powers. For dev/settle, we focus on getting the cost right, with the bonus.
6. Abbreviated game - we played to 6 tableau. At 3-4 tableau, once they start getting things going, I gave my board to control to a subset of them, and coached both sides. Tried (with some "cheating") to get every phase at least once to explain again (they will forget about it) what they do.

The benefit is that they get their hands on the cards and play with them, so the time spent is about the same as reading it all aloud.

As with Race, the best teaching strategy is an adaptive one! After the first shortened game, feel free to gradually add military, then goals. If you time it right, they're just "hey, by the way guys..." and they would adapt to it without a second thought! (Though there might be some groaning..)

As a follow up to my all abilities coder challenge post, here are some results. From Daniel Cristofani's C implementation with GMP. My implementation confirms his results.

Doomed World           19.2441
Separatist Colony      19.2441
Old Earth              20.9860
Epsilon Eridani        21.8792
Earth's Lost Colony    21.8998
Alpha Centauri         21.9158
New Sparta             21.9158
Damaged Alien Factory  21.9377
Ancient Race           21.9715

At first, 20 cards seems quite high compared to experience playing Race, since I'd estimate, the all abilities goal tends to be won at before the 10th card is dropped. But these numbers make sense if you realize how rare the development bonus is, with only 7 cards providing one from the whole deck. If you just draw randomly until you find a development bonus, you are likely to be waiting for ~14 cards. Also, I hope that people are playing better than dropping cards on their tableau at random.

Thanks to Larry and David desJardins for algorithmic insights into the problem. Also, see the thread on board game geek.

You have a Race deck in front of you. You are going to draw cards from the deck until you have all abilities.

What is the expected number of cards to draw to get all abilities? Can you compute this efficiently and exactly if you are sampling without replacement? How does this number change as you start your hand with various home worlds? What would you estimate this number at before running the code?

I think this number will give a pretty good ranking of the likelihood of drawing the all abilities goal. I'd expect Old Earth and Separatist Colony to be favorites.

This Race stats spreadsheet (or converted to CSV, your laziness, or converted to a readable text file, with frequency counts and abilities listed, and an encoding of the ability subset for your maximal laziness) might be useful.

In what he claims to be his best picture ever, Rob's World Championship picture is finally on the World Boardgame Championship webpage. Luckily, his game (and luck) is better than his picture. A much belated congrats to Rob for what is possibly the pinnacle of his board gaming career, his (and the world's) first World Championship in Race for the Galaxy!