My expectations of an experience are absolutely bound up in an assumption of momentum and duration. The thing is though that it’s not an irrelevant aside designed to bulk out an otherwise emaciated review. You might at this point be rolling your eyes – it’s not a game design sin that someone tries to stuff big ambitions into a small box, and my own frustrations about the constraints of physics don’t make it a bad game. The whole cosmos, though? Not even a bit of it. Each card you claim has a scoring context associated with it and at the end of the eighteen actions of the game you sum up all the points in the usual manner.
Actions let you colonise planets, conquer colonies, claim research technologies and a few other things. Some cards have special powers that are only triggered while the card is in your discard pile. The played card goes to a discard pile where it can later be reclaimed if you forfeit your action. You play a card from your hand, often the one you just picked up, and action its effect. Microcosm works like this – every turn you take a card from the three on offer.
It’s not the one that is currently lying to me.
Sure, Eminent Domain: Microcosm is a small version of a much larger game but I haven’t played its big brother so I can’t get upset at that one. The tagline of the game proclaims ‘2 players. Eighteen actions that will be taken over the course of play. Eleven planets that can be conquered or colonised. There are five technologies that can be researched in the game. Eminent Domain: Microcosm is not an exception.Įverything about Microcosm is bereft of grandeur – that’s not necessarily a failing but it’s a feature that would have been less jarring had the theme been something more inherently constrictive. Games about space need huge ambition, and it’s rare indeed that a microgame can fit them in its tight constraints. If a space game is going to successfully land in my affections it’s going to have to first and foremost bridge the gap between my deepest longings and the frustrated and angry limitations with which reality has shackled me. Who knows what wonders the rest of the universe has hidden away behind the inarguable gatekeeper of mean-spirited distance? Every single one of us is made up of exquisitely refined matter that was forged in the heart of dying star and then ejected in a supernova of phenomenal energy and magnificence. The largest volcano in the solar system is three times taller than Everest and could erupt in a spectacular inferno of lava in our lifetimes. Do you really not feel just a bit aggrieved that you’ll never see even the smallest percentage of an appreciable fraction of a sliver of the magic it has to show? On Saturn and Jupiter, rains of diamond spill down from a sky of soot and methane before the atmospheric pressures turn them into molten lakes of glittering gemstone. Think of the swirling majesty of our universe. That’s maybe just my hang-up but it’s a serious point. Why then do game designers keep trying to scale the infinity of the cosmos to human experience? What is the perverse motivation behind producing a small-box space game like Eminent Domain: Microcosm? It’s hard enough to come to terms with the reality of our surly bonds – why celebrate them with excessive minimalism? Most of us will live and die on the same tired soil we touched at our birth. Looking out into the endless blackness of the visible universe is a melancholy experience. Humanity yearns to taste infinity and yet the cruelty of physics is that it forever keeps us constrained within an area of effect defined by the harshest laws of relativistic acceleration. So big that it can hurt our collective souls – as Carl Sagan once memorably said, ‘ The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition’. If there’s one thing about space on which we can all agree surely it’s that it’s pretty big.