Like Solani, which we featured last year on Board's Eye View, The Girl Who Made the Stars is part of an emerging series of titles from Final Frontier Games themed around creation myths. In this case, it's an African myth about the origin of the Milky Way night sky - formed by a young girl who casts into the embers of her family's cooking fire into a previously black and starless sky.
Title notwithstanding, this game by John Shulters focuses not so much on this act of creation as its immediate aftermath: you'll be casting wood ash tokens but the 1-4 players represent village elders who are mainly trying to make sense of the newly illuminated night sky by tracing out constellations and using their light to forage for resources for your village and thereby score points. The game is played over eight rounds during which you'll be drawing 'stars' from a bag to create constellations on your individual board, you'll be creating paths of light on the main board, and you'll be using this illumination to obtain food and other resources.
Placing out the star tiles is something of an optimisation puzzle because you need to connect the lines on the tiles. You're trying to complete constellations by laying out patterns with no lines extending into vacant spaces, and you'll also want to use your placement to collect light crystals and stardust that you can use on the main board. There, The Girl Who Made the Stars is a worker placement game, where you're using light as a currency to place out your villager meeples to collect resources.
Tho' this isn't an overly complex game (we'd classify it as a medium-weight euro), the gameplay isn't intuitively obvious so there's a rules overhead for new players and the rulebook isn't always as clear as the game's crystals. That said, tho', you'll soon succumb to this game's charms and the appealing art of Lamaro Smith. For full immersion, play outdoors on a warm summer night, just illuminated by candlelight and the twinkling stars overhead.