Strange Space Games

ATX Protospiel is this Sat/Sun at Emerald Tavern! It's $5 to show up and playtest a bunch of upcoming games and meet other players/designers in Austin.
I'll be there with Cosmology both days. You can sign up online to reserve playtest spots at:

http://atxgamedesigners.com/protospiel/
Hope to see some of you there! 🌏☀️☄️

Here's the 2nd of the 3 robot gum mini games: ⚡ Doublevolt ⚡
It's 2 players, VS, portable, and plays in about 10-15 minutes.
In Doublevolt, there's a deck of cards of 2 robotic circuits and a little pattern in the middle. Both players start with a hand of cards and each turn will draw one, then play one on the table to connect it to a similar color, THEN, if they have a card in hand with a pattern found on the board that they connected to that turn, that circuit has been completed and they can score that card and set it aside. First to empty their hand wins.
Sounds simple but it gets a little tricky as every card can only be played OR score points, so you end up trying to play the cards you don't think you'll complete, and save the cards you think you can score. You will need to adapt your strategy based on your opponent's plays, which can often block you or provide an opportunity to score a card you weren't expecting.
One more bot game to introduce, stay tuned! ⚡ 🤖 ⚡

Another Cosmology primordial! In honor of our recent lunar event, here's the wood token for the primordial(s) people have been calling the Moon Bats 🌒. This primordial is unique in that it doesn't require specific planet types - it only wants barren, lifeless moons.
This is different because all planets are on double tiles, where each hex of a double tile is a different planet types. Most of the game is choosing the double tile with an ideal combination for your play each turn so that you can work towards primordials, designs, while also making groups of 3 similar planets for anomaly points, all at the same time! 😬
However, on your turn, instead of playing one of the available double tiles, you can always choose instead to play a moon tile, of which there are countless available, but there's a hitch: the moons are single tiles, meaning you'll fill 1 less hex during your turn than usual. At the end of the game, you're penalized for the # of empty space left in your galaxy, so taking a lot of moons can cost you in the long run.
You'll have to determine whether it's worth it to fall behind to grab these primordials or use them for designs. It's a guaranteed type you can always count on, but slow, and you really need to plan ahead before tossing them all over. There are a few double moon tiles as well, but you won't be able to rely on them appearing as they're mixed in with the other double tiles and revealed each turn.
Sidenote, moons and suns are the ONLY single tiles available, meaning they're the only tiles you can use to fill single gaps as the game goes on and this can really hurt you in the endgame if you didn't leave enough spaces to use double tiles and have to waste two turns of single moons instead of being able to play one double tile.

I've been so bad about posting! To make up for it I've got a bunch of detailed posts about the Cosmology components and such coming up, starting with the wooden screen-printed primordial tokens.
There are 7 types of primordials, and 3 of each (with slightly differing requirements). Each one of the tokens is an inch tall, and shaped like the element/resource that primordial represents. When you attract one of these to a system, you'll take the card for VP, then put its token on that system's sun to show it's been used up (only enough room in each system for 1 primordial - they don't get along).
So to start, the water primordial token is shaped like a little wave 🌊, with a simplified, screen-printed icon of Janette's primordial art on each side. The 2 colors on each also match the 2 colors of that resource icon (in this case, water).
I'm not going to talk about how long it took me to trace Janette's art and turn them into vectors that also fit inside an appropriate element shape, but I am happy with the final results.
I'll continue posting the others this and next week!

Have been doing a lot of Cosmology playtesting on Tabletop Simulator to make some final tweaks to some VP amounts.
All of the art and graphics have been finalized, and I'm currently finishing up the final rules draft, and then we'll open this up to anyone who's interested in trying it out on Tabletop Simulator while we start the pre-Kickstarter tasks.
If you're interested in playtesting on TTS, whether joining one of our groups or trying it out with your own game group, please send me a message on here, or email me at [email protected], and we can organize something. You will unfortunately need to own a copy of TTS on Steam, but it's definitely worth the investment.
More stuff to come soon!