Waiting for a 'real' copy of this game to arrive at your doorstep has turned into an art in itself. The backers, how few they might be, do not tire to cheer at every update, however meager the actual news, and have bestowed upon me many a great time. If <PERSON> pops up in my subscriptions, I am always sure that something very entertaining awaits just one click away.
However, suspiciously few has been said as to how this game plays, and that is a very free interpretation of the word 'few'. Actually, nothing of that kind has been said. People have, in an initial wave of untarnished hope, praised the artwork (something I never understood, but this is a matter of pure taste and shall not be a topic of this review). The sun and similar authorities (NASA, Carbon) have been accused of hindering the game's production, mostly by the producing one-woman-company itself. In a totally un-BGG-like fashion, gameplay was ignored completely in the bashing of this game. This got me interested.
I spent quite a bit of time with the rulebook and the components, all of which are available as free high-res PnP on the creator's deviantart site, totaling over 60 pages, including backs and fiddly counters you need to carefully clip. Consider this a warning, really. You don't want to print this out unless you are absolutely certain you won't ever receive your copy of the published game. Or you missed the kickstarter, of course.
Let me be absolutely clear: I own a full copy and have played many games. Not necessarily of Katalyka, though. But I feel sufficiently firm in the rules, as far as I was able to extract them from the rule book, to explain gameplay in terms at the same time broad and exact enough for you to grasp.
The rule book
Seldom have I read one so nonsensical, open to interpretation and full of convoluted pseudo-philosophical and esoteric irrelevancies as this one. I have read ones that make less sense (Those who shall not be named) mind you, but none of them were quite as annoying. In a way that only the true esoteric can be. 504
It's a bit like reading Castaneda, but you aren't 16 and think it's cool because it gives you good reasons to do crazy mushroom drugs, no, this time you're your actual age and this guy is mostly mumbling incoherently. And you have to read it a few times over because in between half-swallowed words, there might hide some rule. So, please excuse my sometimes sketchy representation of the rules, if you think you have grasped them better, feel free to correct me.
Let me give you a rundown of game play.
General gameplay
As one of the highly evolved cultures in this galaxy, you build an engine to transform boring Entropy into exciting Emotional Pathways that feed your Katalykas and allow you to crush your fellow higher beings. To do the latter, you roll dice. To do all of the former, you mostly buy cards and move around resource tokens. There is also a hex-grid-map representing the galaxy that serves some less-defined purpose.
On your turn, you collect Entropy (the main currency in this game) equal to what your Morale on your Culture mat and the Cellestial cards in your possession allow you. You may then spend your Entropy to acquire new cards for your tableau. About every card offers you new ways to spend Entropy or other currencies to acquire new cards or other resources. Unfortunately, there is not much real variation in what you can get by doing so and even less of that is of any use in winning the game. Some win conditions are quite a bit enigmatic, but in the most straightforward and least esoteric version you just want to crush everybody else and rule the galaxy. Yay, you might say. Wait for it, I might answer.
Culture mats
Each player starts the game with his own Culture mat. It gives access to some basic buy actions, one special ability buy action, has a bit of background story about who you are and what you want, a picture, and a tracker for your culture income, called Morale, that doubles as life points. If your Morale drops to zero, you see no reason to struggle any longer and are allowed to leave the game.
The cards
You acquire an awful lot of cards from three different decks. If you buy Cellestial and Katalyka cards, you need to represent their location in a hex on the map by placing a token there. Organica cards are linked to Cellestial cards by placing them next to each other.
Cards represented by tokens on the map need to be linked to each other by placing tiny bond tokens on the tiny hexes in between them. 237