Card Creation and Divination in The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

I didn’t realize it at the time, but The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood came out just as I was finishing my own deck of oracle cards in mid-2023. “Oracle cards” is the general term for cards used for divination ‒ similar to the more famous Tarot cards, which are made up of 78 cards in four suits, but more loose and customizable. A deck of oracle cards can have any number of cards with whatever words and images on them you want. For example, my deck contains 44 cards based on characters from past artwork.

I quickly got word of Cosmic Wheel from friends who knew I did oracle card readings ‒ and I do love a good mystical monster accompanied by a vibrant cast of pixelated characters. Once I finally got my deck printed and shipped and could sit down with the game, I discovered it to be pretty accurate when it came to simulating card creation and divination ‒ albeit with a number of intriguing twists.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood puts you in the position of a witch who summons an otherworldly entity in order to create cards and do readings for all sorts of human-like characters . The people who visit Fortuna ‒ the main character of the game ‒ often become giddy with excitement when offered the chance to get a reading. I’ve similarly found that many if not most people I encounter are surprisingly eager to get readings even when it’s their first time, or they don’t necessarily seem like they’d be into something as ‘out there’ as card divination. If you think you don’t know anyone who’s into Tarot readings, you might be surprised. Tarot seems to have recently experienced a surge in popularity during lockdown, too, thanks to YouTube and Twitch. 

Many people both in real life and the game express some initial hesitation, but from my own experiences, I’ve found that this quickly melts away when a reading begins. I focus on light-hearted and helpful messages so I never have to decide if I should reveal horrible news. This is one area where The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood differs a little, since it lets you dish out some pretty harsh messages. A real reading is less a matter of multiple choices and more of sifting through murky impressions to identify a core message. In-game dialogue, however, portrays your selection as the one and only message Fortuna receives, which is probably closer to how most readers would describe their own experience. Of course, offering dramatically different dialogue options (including some pretty negative ones) makes sense in a video game to keep things interesting and replayable, and a more intuitive and chaotic divination style is probably difficult if not impossible to simulate. Many card readers take a more systematic and logical approach than my own in the way they interpret cards, and some are much less concerned with delivering positive messages in a gentle manner.