When people ask me what I do at work, I clam up. Most of that stuff is confidential. Like when some of us geek gamers play-tested the geek game Race for the Galaxy some evenings, we knew it was a fun game, but we were sworn to secrecy. But now it's publicly available and I can say: it's pretty fun.
Actually, I think it's been publicly available for a while. But I forgot to post about it at the time, though I meant to. Just today I realized that I never did post about it. Intentions, actions, who can tell the difference? Anyhow, fun game. You can choose which phases of the turn you want to have happen, kinda like Puerto Rico or, uhm, that one card game? With the city? That game where you can be the thief, the assassin, the wizard, the priest, the... uhm... and you're trying to buy buildings with gold pieces, and they give you gems of different colors or something?
OK, I don't have a photographic memory for every geek game I've played, but nevertheless I remember this much: I remember enjoying Race for the Galaxy. Check it out.
Luckily (?) I do have a photographic memory for stupid details like this.
You're talking about Ohne Furcht und Adel (Roughly translated, Fearless & Ignoble), published in English as Citadels. Citadels was critized as being a rip-off of an even earlier card game Verräter ("Traitor") though aside from that one role-choosing mechanic it's pretty different.
The story I heard is about Race for the Galaxy is that Alea was looking for designs for a card game version of Puerto Rico and both Andreas Seyfarth (the Puerto Rico guy) and Thomas Lehmann submitted designs. Alea liked both of them and combined elements of each and published San Juan. Seyfarth's name is on it but Lehmann also gets royalties.
Anyway, Lehmann took his leftover ideas and made them spacey and that's Race for the Galaxy.
Another game that uses a similar mechanism, but manages to take it in a bit of a different direction is Glory to Rome, which I highly recommend, even though the cards are ugly.