Button Shy Background: I've been a fan of Button Shy Games for a few years. After hearing about their pocket sized games on my favorite board game podcast of all time (RIP), Low Player Count, I jumped on to Kickstarter to back Circle the Wagons a little over two years ago. When one of my best friends informed me that they had launched a Patreon where you could subscribe to get all of their new games, I supported at the highest tier, which includes a new game each month, a postcard game series, and a bunch of other stuff. The 2020 postcard game series is Personal Space. For a number of reasons, I'm just now getting around to trying it out, and it felt very overwhelming when I first tried to jump into it several months ago, so I thought it might be helpful to document how I got started with it for others who feel similarly in the future.

Step 1: Components- Get the Print and Play files or pieces that came in your original package. As of now, only their Patreon subscribers have access to Personal Space, but that may change in the future. If you're doing the PNP, just download them for now, don't print yet!

Step 2: Discord- Join the Discord and request a planet number/character name/district number. There's a #new-users channel right at the top, and that's where you should swing by and say hi.

Step 3: Planet Setup- Follow along with the Getting Started Tutorial Video. If you have a hard copy, the tutorial provides complete instructions. If you're doing the PNP, use a screenshot tool to grab the images in any photo editor instead of using the stickers. Just to make sure it was super easy for everyone, I actually used Powerpoint to build my starting planet and will likely continue to use it. I just recropped each of the buildings before lining them up in the grid. This is what my starting planet looks like based on the steps so far.For the planet information font: Bankhshrift Light, #4a2b54 for the name, #e8cef1 for the district. They're not exact matches but good enough for me!

Step 4: Complete Setup- Finish setting everything else up. This means naming your character, labeling your neighbor, and getting everything together. I consolidated all of my stuff into one Powerpoint slide so that I can have a nice view of it.

Step 5: Start Day 1- I followed the rest of the instructions in the Tutorial Video and then pulled up the Actions Tutorial video. I still had lots of questions, but the tutorial suggested starting with walking to work, working, walking to the resource place, and gathering resources. Therefore, those were going to be my first four actions. I also watched this older playthrough video before asking about the rules of my specific starting options in the Discord (#rules-questions under Rules and FAQ), and people quickly got back to me with answers. So far, the coolest thing about Personal Space seems to be the fairly thriving Discord community that is very willing to jump in and help you out when needed.

Step 6: Walking- This is simple enough, and it's shown several times in the various videos so I'm not going to talk about how to do it. However, I found a very useful clarification in the Discord about how to end your movement that I wanted to share. 
---- 1) Explore (optional)- Roll 2 dice. If they can match up on your grid with a space that you walked, circle that spot. You can spend Brainpower or Luck to modify these, which I did for my first movement. There are prizes for successfully exploring certain spaces in the Discord (under #explore-prizes in Ongoing Challenges), but there are more advanced things that also interact, so it's probably worth doing every time maybe? However, if you unsuccessfully explore, you have to X out a square at those coordinates, so it's something to balance once you know what you're doing (which I don't).
---- 2) Check for Neighbor (required)- There's a whole thing about where your neighbor can appear that Jason covers in the playthrough video above, but if your neighbor could be on the spot you ended, check and see if they are. If they are, you must spend your next action interacting with them.

---- 3+) All of the rest of these are things that I don't understand yet, so I'm just going to ignore them for now.

Step 7: Working- There are tutorial videos for how to work each job that Jason can link you to in the Discord. I highly recommend doing this! I have the Sell Spaceships job, which is a short dice minigame. After watching a quick recap of all 3 options, this is probably my second favorite of the three, which is pretty good.

Step 8: Resources- After moving, I gathered some resources. I have a pond, which is a press your luck minigame. I was planning to use some of the dice manipulation tools but got super lucky by rolling my guessed number without having to do so for three of my five resource actions. I collected 6 fish and 4 coral, none of which I know what to do with yet.

Step 9: Neighbor- I started off with the random neighbor Arbelle Rarebark and was able to interact with her. As it turns out, she is super cool with a ridiculous but awesome vibe. Some weird resonance was like, throwing her off. So I have the task of trying to help sort it out, which I do over time by visiting specific spaces.

Step 10: Hobbies- I considered trying to buy something from the store, but I was too far away with how my grid turned out. So, I took up the hobby of scavenger hunting, which was super fun. It doesn't translate into resources or anything (unless no one beats my score, which seems unlikely), but it was fun and helped me work through the game a bit better!

Game End: At the end of the day, my board looked like this, which is meaningless to anyone that hasn't done Personal Space yet but apparently was a solid first day. I did all of the basic tasks and sort of understand what I'm doing. If it looks kind of like a mess, that's because it is. After finishing Step 9, I misunderstood some rules and had to reset a few times. However, I now feel comfortable doing the basics!

Setup Going Forward: There are a handful of different files, and I prefer to use computer edited versions for things that I'll be manipulating semifrequently but not constantly. I decided to keep my game board and people references in Powerpoint and print out everything else. I tried to do my job and resources over the computer, and it was just clunky. So here are the only things that I'm keeping digital (for now). Everything else will be printouts.

Gut Reaction: I had a lot of fun figuring it out and learning about the various features along the way. There was A LOT of information in the Discord but it was hard to find it all, so I'm hoping that this might help other people on their first day. I plan to complete every day for at least a week before deciding whether or not I want to keep playing, but it seems like a fun quick diversion. It's a unique combination of overarching RPG with a bunch of minigames thrown in.

Next Up: I'm not sure if I'll make more posts about Personal Space in the future, but the two topics that I'm likely to cover if I do are Intermediate Actions (hobbies, buying, ???) and some kind of review, possibly after the week is up with updates as I go.