I just had a dream about playing a card game with my brothers that felt like I had played it before, problem is I can't remember encountering anything like it before in my waking hours.
It was a game where your goal was to conquer space, first achieving orbit as a nation state, then colonizing as a breakaway movement then conquering the other players as a mutant empire. To start you'd have a leader card (historical bastardizations or myths like vampire eurotrash or teetotaling gunslingers) to be your leader and a powerbase (like a theocratic car dealership that lets you protect stations but prevents you from working with some characters) that would be your nation and hereditary ruling caste. You'd then need to get station cards, characters (pop culture cliches and parodies), heavy elements and light elements. The goal was to play station cards and then fill them up with characters and elements, cooperating with the other players as necessary. You need to cooperate to make a station because if it doesn't have it's requirements its going to crash onto the planet. But once a station is on its feet your characters could attack the other players and steal the station (or peacefully coexist if you prefer). There were a ton of light element cards because you'd need to spend them constantly, it cost one to move each other card into orbit and every station needed a light element maintenance card from one player every turn to avoid crashing. This light element needed to be paired with a matching heavy element with the light element getting spent and the heavy not.
I dont remember what exactly ended the orbital stage but the rules jocularly told us it was time to do away with antiquated human notions about nation states and humanity. So your nation and hereditary ruler bonuses now became inactive but it was possible to combine characters and leaders with heavy elements to create mutant strains. So taking the Grandmistress of the Knights of No Fun you could combine her combine her with carbon or iron or whatever with each heavy element having a different mutant properties on the card. You didn't need orbital bases any more at this stage now it was about building up colonies and moving your characters and heavy elements away from the orbital bases to colonies. The heavy maintenance costs from the orbital stage didn't apply there. My alarm clock woke me up before the alien empire stage but I'm guessing it had something to do with picking a heavy element stain and trying to wipe out the other players.
So I have no clue what inspired this dream but I'm wondering if any card game of this nature exists. Anybody got any ideas?
Edit: Turns out I have the age old answer to the question "is it possible to go to sleep sober and wake up drunk?"