Craft your very own galaxy!

Become a cosmic architect and design your very own galaxy one star at a time, creating colorful nebulae and sprinkling them with life. 😉 This is what you do in 🌌 Crafting the Cosmos, a brand new lightweight game for 2-4 players! 

The game presents you with 2 main puzzles: drafting resources and crafting your galaxy - these form the two phases of each turn. Gaining resources is a pretty cool mini-game using a shared central rondel and marbles! 😊

On your turn you get 3 movements to shift marbles in a clockwise direction - either your own or the neutral “dark-matter” marbles. Then, you collect resources: ☝️ You receive the active reward from the section where your marble lands, but also gain passive rewards from all other sections, depending on the number of marbles present. 🙃 By the way, the game’s inlay doubles as the board, holding both the rondel and different resources. Pretty clever, though unfortunately it is less ideal as an actual inlay.

Once you've gathered resources, it's time for the crafting phase:
🌌 Surround nebula tokens with the correct types of stars to score points.
🦠 Use lifeforms to surround completed nebulae and evolve them into advanced life.
⚡ Unlock special abilities with energy cards.

And there's more! You can collect time crystals 💎 for points, transform stars into versatile "joker" supernovas 💫 or acquire new nebulae.

Some star- and lifeform spaces are shared between nebulas, so with clever placement you can more efficiently fulfill conditions. 🧐 This is also where another resource type, the “gravitron” come into play, which lets you reposition things. You also lose some stars and lifeforms as you go, so forward-planning is a must. At the end of each round, goal cards advance along a track, and the one in the fourth (last) position is scored. Cycling through all goal cards triggers the end of the game. 🏆

💬Crafting the Cosmos is an enjoyable puzzle, albeit perhaps a bit long for what it is. It has some novel ideas, and an amazing table presence thanks to the cool 3D components. I just wish those tiny, fiddly life form tokens would be a tiny bit bigger. 😅