The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood review: a wonderfully witchy fable told through player-created Tarot

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is many, magical things, but initially, at least, it is a card game in which you create your own cards. This takes the form of an MS Paint-esque editor in which you glue together a background, character assets and a collection of props, rotating, duplicating and altering the size of each asset with the mouse. Each asset soaks up a certain amount of arcane energy, divided between the four elements, which mean somewhat different things here than in the spell systems of other games. And each final design generates a different combination of meanings, some of them contradictory at a glance, all of them keys to the game’s weird, whimsical and sorrowful wider universe.

It seems an overly rudimentary system at first, though that’s coming from the perspective of somebody who’s reasonably familiar with Tarot, one of the game’s chief influences, and partial to devising their own crummy decks of visual poetry cards. In particular, I grumped to myself about the limits on shrinking and enlarging: I wanted to fashion more abstract, prog-rock designs with faces in pixellated close-up, whereas The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood sort of defaults to “dude holding thing against landscape” setups familiar from the Rider-Waite Tarot. While there are pieces you can plug in and leave out as you see fit, the system also insists that you include certain props from each batch, and I’ll admit to using the layer tool to hide unwanted skulls, floral wands and so forth behind other assets.

But I am, of course, partly describing my own initial shortage of inspiration: the more you tinker and acclimatise to the editor, the more artful your methods become. And as your designs grow more vivid or delicate (you eventually unlock the