I've been reading tarot cards for myself (and on request for friends) for over seven years. This made Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood incredibly appealing. Who doesn't want to be a cosmic witch reading cards for your coven?

There's a lot that I loved about this game: the atmospheric music of fingerspit, the strong writing of nuanced relationships, and the minigame of creating your own divinatory cards was spellbinding. Honestly if the whole game was creating cards, I'd still play it.

Where it fell apart for me is the integration of the interpretation of the cards when Fortuna does readings. I never felt like what cards I pulled influenced the dialogue options. I'm not sure a game could really make interpreting tarot or other divinatory cards a mechanic because it's so subjective.

When I read tarot, I pull from my meanings of the card, the question, the spread, and the way that all of those things interact. I usually describe the imagery in detail as a way of connecting the question to the cards pulled.

When you interpret the cards in Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, the cards and what you say seem to have nothing to do with one another. Fortuna never references the titles of the cards or even the keywords that the game assigns them. I imagine coding something like that would be an absolute nightmare, and was probably outside of the scope of the game. I also don't think this will bother most people, but with my particular interests this got to me, pretty quickly. Like, sure, I'm enamored with my cards, but what do they mean? Does it matter which ones I pull? Fortuna seems to believe so, but the game, mechanically, doesn't align with that.

Still, a perfect Halloween game with flaws that probably won't bother many players.