In Micro Cosmos, each player takes the role of the chief commander of an Ark, whose mission is to repair the damage caused by the Great War. Their task is to guide their spaceships to planets across the galaxy, terraforming them, building new colonies, and searching for survivors to bring back to their home planets.
1-4 players, age 10+
Playing time: 40-90 minutes
Designer: Kamil Langie
Artwork: Jarosław Wajs
Publisher: Thistroy Games
https://thistroygames.com/
Micro Cosmos is now live on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thistroygames/micro-cosmos
Over the course of the game, you upgrade your Ark to gain skills and unlock colony buildings on your player board. You move your spaceship to planets, space stations and moons, and discover new planets to terraform. Once you arrive at your destination, you can put your crew to work obtaining new resources, trading them or collecting new crew. But you must plan carefully: only crew members whose color matches the color of your location can be activated.
At your location, you can also perform a main action: obtain depicted resources, terraform by spending matching resources from your spaceship, search for or settle survivors, or build colonies and trade outposts.
Resources are quite scarce while you need them for a multitude of actions: upgrading your ship, terraforming the planets and building colonies, so there is a lot to plan and think about how to spend them optimally. Crew cards can also be used in a variety of ways: in addition to activating them when the color matches your location, you’ll also need to use them for the engineer or leader depicted while building colonies.
Each time a planet is fully terraformed, players earn points for their contribution. When 3 planets have been terraformed, the game ends and players receive additional points based on the number of survivors they have settled and colonies they have built. Whoever has accumulated the most points may call themselves the greatest savior of civilizations!
I’m really impressed with the amount of gameplay packed into such a small box. As mentioned above, the resource management is really tight while the multi-use card system feels like a clever puzzle of which every piece matters. If this sounds like a game that you’d enjoy playing, I can highly recommend checking out the Kickstarter campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thistroygames/micro-cosmos
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