The Game and the Sphere, the Star Constellations Are Near.
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 01:26:40 AM
The Idea...
While working with different star catalogs on the new star constellation sphere, I learned about the brightest stars, how many stars we can see with the naked eyes, how many star constellations are designated and about the distances between the stars and our earth. I was often reminded of the good old card game “Car Quartets”. I can only tell for Germany, but I guess everyone here owned a car quartets when he was a child. So the Idea was born to make a card game together with a new sphere.
The Prototypes
In the video, you can see our first prototype of the sphere and also 6 cards of the card game. These are by far not finished nor historically or scientifically correct, but give you a good sense of where the journey is going to. We stay in contact to a really friendly scientist who researched about the star constellations since 1998. She has two doctor´s degrees and wrote one thesis about Uranography (celestial cartography). She told us that there is no common consensus about the line patterns that connect the stars, but she likes our Idea and is willing to help us with our patterns. In 1930 the IAU International Astronomical Union defined the now common 88 star constellations by its boundary and not by the connections.
There are many sources for line pattern you can find, which are much older or from different civilizations.
Together with the scientist, we want to improve the line patterns and we want to see what would be the most beautiful, but also scientific and educational model to put into our sphere.
The Drawings
The 88 drawings of the card game are already finished and I find them mesmerizing. We now want to share 6 of them with.
The Attributes
At the moment the cards show the following attributes and Information:
- Latin name of the star constellation
- Name of the brightest star
- Number of bright stars visible in the city (< magnitude 3)
- Number of stars visible with the naked eye and on a dark countryside (< mag 6)
- Distance to earth (brightest star)
- The area on the night sky (IAU).
We also thought about the Number “connected stars” and the “round trip of the traveling salesman”. We want to calculate the shortest path for a salesman in a spaceship to reach all connected stars within a star constellation and come back to earth.
The Rules
We are still not completely sure about the rules of the card game, so we decided to ask for your help. Most of us used the car quartets cards for the game "Super Trump" where you basically compare an attribute of the card with your friend's cards and the winner takes the trick. Many didn´t even know, that the real Quartets is way more complex. For the original quartets, you need to collect “quartets”, a combination of 4 cards of a kind. Having this in mind, the game could be fun for adults as well as for their kids so we most likely want to stay with this concept. We will develop the final rules and variants within the campaign because we are certain, that we will find a nice way to play with the cards. The good thing is, they already are informative and nice to look at.
CinkS labs Kids
Also, we had the Idea of a more colorful version of the cards especially for smaller kids and we want to know your thoughts about it. My brother thought about taking care of his own campaign with a "memory game" using the colorful design and a collection of star constellations.
The Polling
For some of these open questions, we decided to make a polling within our campaign. We want to know about your suggestions and wishes, as well as about the name of the card game, the attributes or the colors. We are happy about your help in the comments, so we gain some material for our polling.
The Campaigns
We want to launch two separate campaigns, one for the sphere and one for the card game. We do this because we want to reach as many people as possible and we want to be found in the category astronomy, but also in card games.
Stretch Goals
On the one hand, we thought about Special finishes of the cards like glow in the dark paint or tiny holes, so you could play at night or fit the card with the actual stars on the night sky and see them through it. On the other hand, there are many sources for our star constellations, so we have in mind to design different versions of the Sphere, maybe even of the game. For example, there is the Almagest catalog from around 135 A.D., with 1024 stars in 48-star constellations. Or the Suzhou star chart, the Chinese-Korean constellations with 1464 stars in 283 star constellations, but also some more. Together with Susanne, we will elaborate the possibilities of different versions and we offer them as stretch goals.
Early Bird
We also want to offer early bird offers, so if you are interested in a newsletter with the exact time the campaign starts, feel free to subscribe here:
https://cinks-labs.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Just a fun fact
Two months ago, there was the Perseid meteor shower. I wanted to take some long exposure photos with my new phone and I was so baffled by the quality of the pictures, especially the number of stars and the color they revealed, that I wanted to show you how easy it is to get some good photos of the night sky. All you need is a selfie stick with a tripod, a modern phone and 30s exposure time, to see the stars as you might have never seen them before.
