A printable Race for the Galaxy consume log lives or dies on the one record nobody keeps: which good went to which consume power, in which order, because the Consume phase is mandatory. Every round the players secretly choose one phase each, and only the phases somebody chose actually happen, in the order Explore, Develop, Settle, Consume, Produce. When Consume happens, every player must use all of their eligible consume powers, discarding goods face down, and each good can feed exactly one power. Nobody at the table argues about whether Consume happened; they argue about whether that novelty good was traded, eaten for points, or eaten for cards, and whether the double-points bonus applied to it.
The trade is where the argument starts, because it happens before any consume power and only the players who chose Consume: Trade may do it. A player who chose Trade must sell one good first, drawing cards by its kind: Alien technology draws 5, Genes draws 4, Rare elements draws 3, and Novelty draws 2. Only then do the consume powers fire. The other Consume bonus works the opposite way: a player who chose Consume: 2x VPs doubles the victory point chips their consume powers provide, but not their card draws, and not victory points earned by discarding cards from hand. So the same three goods are worth a different pile of points and a different pile of cards depending on which bonus card sits face up in front of each player, and the sheet has to record the bonus before it records anything else.
The worked consume line is the part buyers actually check before they trust the sheet. Take a player who chose Consume: Trade, holding three novelty goods, with Free Trade Association and Galactic Trendsetters in the tableau. First the trade: one Genes good is sold for 4 cards. Then Free Trade Association consumes two novelty goods, worth 1 victory point and 1 card apiece, for 2 points and 2 cards. Then Galactic Trendsetters consumes the last novelty good for 2 points. The line reads: traded 1 Genes good for 4 cards, consumed 3 novelty goods for 4 victory points and 2 cards, 6 cards drawn in total, and every number on the line can be checked against the goods that left the tableau and the powers that ate them.
The counterfactuals are what make the log worth printing rather than scribbling. If the same player had chosen Consume: 2x VPs instead of Trade, there would be no sale at all, and the doubled powers would score 4 points from Free Trade Association and 4 points from Galactic Trendsetters, for 8 points and only the 2 cards from Free Trade Association: 4 more points, 4 fewer cards, decided by one bonus card. And if the player had also held a power that consumes a good for two cards, the order still would not save a good for later, because consume powers are mandatory and the assignment of goods to powers is fixed when the phase resolves, not renegotiated after the first cards are drawn. The game ends when a player reaches 12 cards in the tableau or the victory point pool runs out, so a miscounted consume phase is not a footnote; it is the difference between ending the game on your terms and handing the last chips to someone else.
That is why the sheet sells as a download rather than as a blank victory point track. A blank track records how many chips each player holds; a worked consume log records the decision the table actually argued about, with each good, its kind, the power that consumed it, the bonus that modified it, and the points and cards it produced all on the same line, so the phase total falls out of the sheet instead of out of a twenty-minute recount. Print it, fill one line per good per Consume phase, and the next time someone says that novelty good was traded, the answer is on the paper, not in anyone's memory.
This is an unofficial fan-made log sheet, not affiliated with or endorsed by Rio Grande Games. Race for the Galaxy is a card game designed by Tom Lehmann.
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