Recently finished playing all three phases of this game with friends over discord voice call (three sessions, five players total), and it was a TON of fun!
We used a shared painting canvas app for Phase 1 to draw, name, and embellish our oracle cards in real time*, so we completed our deck in roughly two and a half hours. We ended up with some very unique cards, which had a big influence over everything in the following phases!
Phase 2 required some advance prep to set up a custom tabletop (we used playingcards. io, with custom card fronts), but it took us less than two hours to craft a whole city and cast of characters from our oracle cards. I really enjoyed how all twenty cards got used in making our ten characters.
Our final session for Phase 3 was a little more intense. Even with a timer running to keep scenes from getting too long, we still spent three hours in this session since deciding on a concept/location/roles for each scene usually took more time than we planned for. But I think it was worth it, since we weaved together a very flavorful story involving magic spice and uprising in our fantasy city.
Thank you for putting together this neat game! My personal favorite things about Aurora were:
1) the division of the phases – with friends in different timezones it was easier to schedule three regular ~2.5 hour game sessions than it would've been to set aside time for a big ~6 hour session, and each session ended on a satisfying note
2) how big of an impact our oracle cards had on our story's foundation and direction. It made everything feel super personal, and I can't imagine telling the same story with a different deck of cards or a different set of players.
* What worked for us was to let two players simultaneously take their turns drawing + labeling. The other three players embellished cards while waiting for one of two active people to finish their turn and pass it to the next person in our turn order. This kept us crafting cards at a good pace.