Crafting The Cosmos was a game I first played on Board Game Arena, quickly becoming convinced of it deserving a place on my shelf as well. It’s a wonderful, colourful, tactile experience of fusing elements together to create your own world. Let’s see what’s inside the box.
Introduction
There is a lot of stuff in here and some really first-class components for you to get your hands on. We start with four dual-layered player boards that will ultimately house scoring tokens, fledgling nebulae, stars, and life tokens. There’s a neat 3D card row table for objectives, and it’s all held together by an insert that acts as the focal point for the start of your turn and ultimately helps you decide what your actions will yield. The highlight for me are the star tokens – four sets of different coloured, double-ended resin pieces representing hydrogen, helium, carbon and oxygen that fit snugly into your board and can be flipped should a star become a supernova. These are genuinely stunning!
The Big Bang
Setup is pretty nifty as the insert holds all the pieces conveniently in place. Players take a board, one each of the level 1, 2 and 3 nebula tokens, adding them to the marked recesses on the centre spaces of their board. Every player places a hydrogen star in the middle (so it’s adjacent to all 3 of those nebulae), draws a hand of 4 cards, and places their time chamber marker on space zero.
Each player uses one of their marbles to act as a score token, and the rest are randomly shuffled alongside neutral pieces and added to the slots around the main board. The number of these neutral dark energy marbles depends on player count, as does the starting communal pool of time chamber tokens you set out, which will act as one of two possible endgame triggers. Finally, we deal six random objective cards and flip the first one face up into the card table.
In the beginning…
…there was the Energy phase, and it allowed us to get stuff to craft our own cosmos. This is a neat combination of action selection that also allows you some flexibility in how strong those actions can be. It’s never as simple as merely saying “I want to add to my time chamber” – you get to largely determine how much you’ll add, and I think that allows for a lot of decision-making for each player’s individual strategy.
Around the centre of the main board are four “controls” that each hold a maximum of three energy tokens – remember there are some neutral pieces in there as well as a token per player. On your turn, you must move your energy token at least one space clockwise around the board, and you may also move the neutral pieces. In total, you have up to three movements, and if you ever move a piece into an already full area, it simply skips over to the next available slot.
The total of this movement will determine two things. Firstly, what’s the primary reward you’ll take this turn, and secondly, how strong each of the resource gathering steps will be (determined by the number of energy tokens in that corresponding control space). The four controls correspond to the types of cards and relate to Time, Chemistry, Gravity, and Light. There’s a lot going on here, so rather than parrot the rulebook directly back at you, I’ll give you a summary.
The primary rewards are always some combination of stars to place on your player board plus something. Your choices are two helium stars and the ability to turn a star into a wild supernova, two oxygen stars and the ability to convert life on your board to stable life, one carbon star and your choice of a new nebula, or simply three hydrogen stars (this being the only primary reward that isn’t coupled with something else).
You then go round the entire board, starting with the space you took your primary reward from, and take resources from any space with any energy token in it – yours, neutral or an opposing player’s. As we’ve talked about, the strength/quantity of these resources will vary depending on how many tokens are in that control slot.
For example, having moved my energy token to the Light space, I take three stars and cards equal to the number of tokens there. Let’s say I’d felt pretty flush for cards already, so I’d only placed my token there (drawing one card) and moved anything else to more advantageous spaces. Next around the board is the Time space where I’ve added neutral markers to my opponent's existing piece, meaning I get to add three time crystals to my time chamber. Finally, the Gravity and Chemistry spaces have one neutral marker each, meaning I get a single movement of something on my board (marked with a little cube) and an unstable proto life token to place. Now the work begins!
Craft it like you mean it
We’ve picked up a bunch of stuff, and now we need to get a move on finalising all these nebulae and score ourselves some points!
Any stars you’ve acquired can be placed into any open space on your board without restriction. Obviously you want them adjacent to as many matching nebula spaces as possible for maximum efficiency, though sometimes you’ll take a gamble on what might come your way in the future.
The nice thing about this is that you might have picked up on the fact that there’s a vague relationship between the number of a certain type of star you get and its general prevalence across the universe. So you can usually feel pretty confident that any nebulae you take in the future will need a hydrogen star, but the mix and frequency of rarer things like oxygen is harder to predict.
Thankfully, any nebulae you take can also be placed anywhere without restriction, so it usually makes sense to place those first if you’ve picked one up alongside your carbon star.
Purple proto-life tokens must be placed next to any adjacent piece on the board. You begin the game with one at the top of your board, and you’ll acquire and move these as the game progresses. Most of the time you’re looking for efficiencies – where can you place things to satisfy multiple requirements at the same time – but sometimes your gut instinct or the upcoming objective cards might decide for you. After you’ve placed your bounty of cosmic cargo, we look at scoring your creation before wrapping up your turn.
Celestial point salad
You can score points in a fair few ways here – completing nebulae and getting points for life tokens as well as the nebula itself, while discharging your time chamber will score you more points the more often you’re able to do it.
If you’ve surrounded a nebula token with all the corresponding stars, then congratulations, you’ve fostered the conditions to create advanced life! Move your score tracker on your board along for the points listed on the nebula token and flip it over. The only catch is you do need to discard one of the stars you’ve used to fulfil the needs of that nebula in order to finish it. A bittersweet move, but it can help you remove things you no longer need.
If you’ve also managed to surround that nebula with proto-life or stable life tokens, then congratulations again! You can create advanced life there! Discard any proto-life (purple side up) tokens from around that nebula and place the topmost advanced life token from the communal stack on top. The first few of these are worth more points than the remainder, so it pays to be first here. It also helps to have more stable life, as they stay on your board and can reduce the number of turns you need to trigger advanced life on future turns.
If your time chamber has filled up by your token reaching the sixth spot, you slide it to the right to fill up the next available space, gaining points and a star of your choice to add to your board. Again, the order of operations here can help you chain stuff together quite nicely!
What am I doing with all these cards?
A fair question. At any time on your turn, you can cash in sets of same-colour cards to gain an ongoing benefit and add one of your player tokens to that control area on the board. Slots cost either 2, 3, or 4 matching cards and allow you to draw that many from the corresponding supply and add one to that space next to your board. For the rest of the game, you can avail yourself of those benefits, some of which will require you to discard cards to activate them.
Adding a player token to the main board means that you have an ongoing +1 to the strength of that space’s resource gathering. To go back to our example from earlier, if I’d had a token in the Time space, I would have taken four moves on the time chamber instead of three. These can be powerful if you manage to get them out early enough in the game, so definitely worth watching out for.
End of your turn, objectives and ending the game
After you’ve moved your energy, gathered your resources, organised your cosmos and done any scoring, it’s time for some end of round stuff. Ostensibly for you as the player, that means making a final choice of either gaining a nebula token of your choice or stabilising one proto-life by flipping it to its green side. There’s a cube slider that reminds you of this at the end of your turn.
At the end of the round, you move all objective cards down a space, flipping over a new one if possible, and scoring the card that’s on the fourth and final space of the objective tracker. Anyone with more than 10 cards discards down, and you start a new round!
The game ends when either the final objective is scored or all the time chamber tokens in the communal pool have been taken, and you need to take one. This latter way has universally been the way the game has ended for me, but it is possible to do it with the objectives.
Final thoughts
I absolutely love Crafting the Cosmos. It has the things I love from any kind of resource management game, and it just looks absolutely incredible on the table. The combination of action selection and varying resource gathering works brilliantly, and the ability to chain some actions to get things exactly where you need them is great.
I’ve not covered everything in detail here, but your ability to turn a star into a supernova and make it wild to fulfil another goal, or moving stars and life across the board at just the right time, is a great feeling, and it’s all underpinned by these quality components and this incredibly tactile experience.
Not much else to say beyond I heartily recommend this one!
