Astromania: The Astronomy Card Game

Greetings, researcher!

Congratulations on making it to astronomy graduate school. You have been presented with the opportunity to contribute to professional astronomy research and add to the vast compendium of humanity's knowledge of the universe. You’ll be studying objects in space by collaborating with other astronomers, using cool new telescopes and tools, and getting a chance to publish your work in the prestigious Astromania journal.

Overview of game components and gameplay

In Astromania, you and your friends don the role of a graduate student who’s trying to get their PhD. Your career’s success relies on studying objects in the sky and publishing papers. Astromania lets you accomplish this with its three card decks :

The starboard is where all the objects in the Sky (Deck) live. Successfully ‘studying’ an object on the Starboard gives you Science Points (SP). These Science Points are your progress toward solving your assigned prompt from the Prompt Deck. Once you have the required number of points, you can publish your prompt as a paper. Whoever publishes three papers first, gets a PhD and wins the game! A typical game setup, mid-game, looks something like this —

The Draw deck is further split into Astronomers, Tools, and Interact Cards. Astronomers and Tools help you study objects on the Starboard, which is where most of the gameplay lies. Studying an object is a combination of playing an astronomer and a tool card and rolling two dice. Just like real-life astronomy, a successful study relies on not only playing your cards right, but also a fair bit of luck!

Interact Cards help you interact with other players, mess with them, or boost them up. After all, Astromania is a peer-reviewed journal. All for Science!

So where is the Astronomy education in this game?

Astromania doesn’t directly hand you astronomy trivia. Rather, it helps you build up your knowledge using pattern matching in the form of game bonuses. For instance, you can reduce the minimum number you need to roll by matching icons on the astronomer or tool card you’re using with the same shape/color icon on the object card.

In astronomy terms, this is because you are observing the object in the ‘wavelength’ that gives you the best visibility of this object and/or you’re using the astronomer who specializes in studying this wavelength! This increases your chances of successfully studying this object and you need a little less luck when trying to get science out of it (i.e. lowering the number of dice rolls required). Matching the right tool with the astronomer who specializes in using it also gives you a dice roll bonus for similar reasons.

Another type of bonus in Astromania is increasing the Science Points you get from a successful observation. Each successful object study gives you the SP intrinsically associated with the object. You can increase the SP you get out of this by matching the icon of the same shape/color on the lower half of the object card to your astronomer or tool card.

In astronomy terms, you are using the correct techniques to get relevant and useful scientific information out of this object or your collaborating astronomer specializes in using this certain technique. This gets you more science from your study! Matching icons on your assigned prompt with the object you studied also gives you an SP bonus.

By the end of an Astromania game session, you’ll probably learn something new about how astronomy research works, simply with skills as straightforward as icon matching! What’s more, all these icons are inspired by real study techniques astronomers use, detailed in the Glossary section of the game’s rulebook. Each object, astronomer, and tool card also has scientifically accurate descriptions meant to be a casual and quick read for those interested. You can use these as a guide to learn more about what happens behind the scenes of astronomy academic work as well as to learn something new about our universe!