Make Hot Sauce, Mix Colors, and Balance Angels and Demons to Achieve Virtue

In Nova Lux, you take charge of a federation of orphaned alien species that have escaped dying star systems in the wake of a galactic apocalypse. The Universe is winding down. Entropy is increasing to maximum. You must manage precious resources through trade, conflict, and exploration to sustain biological life and power your Ark of Salvation, Hydrogen Converters, and Biosphere Engine — all while building a star colony that can outlast the end of the universe and give it new light, a.k.a., "nova lux".

You will strive to live a good life and balance the pursuits that give it meaning. You will quest for internal tranquillity and life-long peace. You will struggle with existential conflict as your angels and demons battle to shape your soul and define your character. You and your fellow man are in this together. Don't let them down.


Each round represents a decade of the players' lives and consists of three phases: Actions, Existential Conflict, and Spiritual Warfare. In the action phase, players move their focus on various vices and virtues, cleanse their soul of the demons that plague them, enhance life pursuits that will unlock new abilities, and increase their tranquility, which will aid them in removing demons. The action phase prepares the team for what is about to come.

After the action phase, each player draws from a deck that will (among other things) swarm their souls with angels and demons. Then, they check for existential conflict, i.e., an abundance of uncontested demons with no angels to stand in opposition. For each existential crisis that occurs, the player has new challenges to overcome.

Finally, the spiritual warfare phase ensues in which the forces of good and evil battle, and the dominating force is left standing for the next decade of their lives.

Gameplay takes place on a triangular playing board that has a light behind it so that you can better see the colors created by the game pieces during play. On a turn, you draw a playing piece from the bag — feeling for a desired shape, if you wish, but not knowing the color of the piece — then place that piece in any legal location on the board. Pieces come in yellow, cyan, and magenta, and initially you must play these pieces on the lowest level of the game board. If you can play a piece so that it's entirely supported by other pieces, then you can play on the second level of the board; by doing this, you can create the secondary colors green, orange, and purple — and this is what you'll need to do to win.


Each player in the game is assigned a secondary color, and at the end of a three-player game, whoever has more spaces of their color showing wins. In a two-player game, the player with the largest contiguous block of their color wins, so the game is more about blocking than simply creating your color wherever you can. If you're green, for example, you want lots of yellow and cyan on the bottom level so that you can potentially transform it into green later, while magenta is useless to you and ideally you can stack magenta pieces on top of one another to put them out of play altogether.

The game ends once all the pieces have been played or when no piece remaining in the bag can fit on the board.

The district of Las Picantes belongs to El Gobernador, a former industrialist with a mysterious past, who built his fortune in the import-export of...various merchandise. He now lives in isolation, only surrounded by his family — as well as his bodyguard, accountants, drivers, sports coach, and the zookeeper of his private zoo.

But El Gobernador is bored to tears. Always seeking new thrills and challenges, he decides to organize an unforgettable event during the "Fiesta Nacional", a competition open to all wannabe-chefs in the world to cook for him the most intense hot sauce possible! Whoever wins the contest will receive enough money to open their own restaurant!


In order to be able to cook their sauce, though, the participants in Buurn have to get the best ingredients in ruthless auctions called "top-downs". Cooks will collect different ingredients sold at these auctions to create the hottest sauce ever created. Everything is allowed in this savage contest! Trying to obtain the best ingredients by being friends with the organization or even stealing ingredients from your rivals are classic ways to win the prize!

At the end of the contest, El Gobernador's jury will taste all the hot sauces, then assign victory points to each cook, based on the type of ingredients they used and the bonuses they obtained. The one who receives the most points wins the competition and their very own restaurant, paid by El Gobernador!