How similar is the board game to the PC game?

Do you gain recourses each turn and then spend them to upgrade?

How many races are included in the main box set?

Does it play like an area control game?

No, it's entirely different, although dynamic and exciting as video game.

It's more luck-based (drawing combat cards, random Galaxy Setup).

Unlikely in the video game, you don't need scouting at all - you see almost everything on the board, with growing experience you may try to quess enemy plans to get the advantage.

Resources are normally not gathered - you control areas providing resources and assign your "money" (workers) to those areas. If you don't (or: can't) use your workers, you will have no use of your resources. And vice versa. However, you may deplete areas or even sabotage areas of your enemies.

All important units of all 3 races are implemented.

Yes, controlling important areas is the key to the victory. Unless you use game variants, modifying victory conditions. But even they cannot fix the problem with balancing the influence of starting planets and of the galaxy shape. Combined with victory conditions, they almost everytime put some players in favour (which is not so important in video game).

For more details, watch the following overview:

I read couple report of this game before I bought it and most people try to compare pc game and board game. Video game is completely different story in my opinion but like in video game you have to predict your opponent moves and have good knowledge of units capabilities. The BG randomness is reduce only to battle cards you draw (and galaxy setup but this can be fixed), but then again, your moves have crucial impact on how good your cards is...every game is different be cause of "map" and tactic you choose.

I got to say...SCBG have soul of his video counterpart and not only be cause of units which you command but also strategy and battle

RoBro said:

Style/feeling wise i'd say they are very similar. The main difference is Scale (and ofc the fact that a strategy board game is turn based, not real time )! Where you in the PC game fight on a small map at a time with up to 200 individual units you command and fight over planets, twice the amount of players, in a normal BG setup. These planets have 2-5 areas each which gives resources or victory points.

Just like in the PCG you harvest resources to upgrade, with the main difference that you cannot save and stockpile them (which you really shouldn't do in the PCG anyway). You have worker tokens and place them at the point of harvest to get the resources needed to buy troops and upgrades. This also makes them vulnerable to worker harassment, just like in the PCG.

3 races, 2 factions of each, so max 6 players.

To a large part it is an area control game, with clever limits that makes it dangerous to have too much area. In fact everything is dangerous and you're never safe, that's a nice feature.

/Y