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For those of you who get that reference, you can attack the darkness with me anytime.
Anyway, let’s start creating our universe.
So far all we have is a dense black hole in the center of our galaxy and a few tracks showing how cultured we are, how successful we are in our Might, Stability and with other alien cultures (Xeno Relations). In order to start our Civilization, we need our deck of cards.
As you see, you don’t have to be fancy and draw pictures of everything. You can also abbreviate the card suits as well, though you have to be careful as I have played before and mixed up Heart and Hand. The suits are as follows:
S – Sun
M – Moon
R – Heart
K – Skull
H – Hand
F – Foot
So simply make 36 cards, by making cards 1 through 6 in each suit (ie. 1 Sun, 2 Sun, 3 Sun…, 1 Moon, 2 Moon…)
Now we can create worlds. Shuffle up your cards and grab one. I grabbed 1 Hand. This will be the first world we have created in our galaxy. Since it is an Original world, you’ll first mark it with a ‘O’ to show that. Any worlds you create in the first game you’ll mark with a ‘1.’ The second game you’ll mark cards with a 2 and so on. It doesn’t really do anything in game, but it shows you how your galaxy is evolving over play.
So I mark my 1 Hand with the worlds: O. World – because it’s a World. Ahem.
Then you flip two cards and put their numbers down as the “sector number” where this world exists. I get a 2 and a 5. And finally flip two more cards and look at Table 5 near the back of the rulebook to see what technology is available on that planet. I pull 5 and then a heart. So my first planet now looks like this:
You see for my tech I wrote the suit I pulled, the name of the tech, the action it affects and then what it actually does. That way I don’t have to look anything up.
Yes, I named it Syrnix. It’s close enough to Syrinx, but they like guitar music.
And I typed it wrong.
Okay, turn on some music and create 11 more worlds.
Done? No? Okay.
Now?
Stop reading!
Okay, put all those cards in the deck and give them a good shuffle and get ready to start the game.
First flip over the first 5 cards of the deck. If there are any Worlds in those cards, choose 1 to be your Homeworld. I only had 1 choice, so I grabbed Casteem, one of my poorly named planets. If there wasn’t a world in those 5 cards, I would have drawn another 5 to do it again. I find the hex that matches the location of my new World and put three of my pieces there. I am now the owner of a fresh new planet.
Then we pull cards for the neutral worlds. Simply pull cards from the top of the deck, discarding them until you pull World cards. When you get to one, put it in the Neutral World spot on your table (wherever you want that) and place 3 neutral pieces (whatever is different than your own pieces). Do this until either: you pull your sixth world or you pull a world that has the same number (ie. card number, like 1 hand and 1 skull are the same number). That second world wouldn’t get played and you’d be done. In the relatively rare case you pull a neutral world that matches the location of another neutral world, increase the number of cubes on that spot to 5. If there’s already 5 there, just discard the card and wonder at your ability to skew math probabilities. If you pull a card whose location matches yours, also just discard the world.
In the end, I ended up pulling two worlds before I pulled a number that matched, so my final board looks like this:
I’m ready to play.
Very Wordy 