Cosmic Encounter

Gamers who graduate from the Monopoly and Sorry phase tend to share a similar preference with one another. They tend to look for games that have the layout changed each game. They also want games that force them to make tough decisions, yet have rules that are simple enough to fit into one page. The biggest feature they want, or lack of it, is luck. In fact, having a game that has a roll and move mechanic in these great times is a legal reason to commit arson. This doesn’t mean luck doesn’t exist in these modern board games, but it’s not longer the dominating factor on whether or not you win.

When Fantasy Flight Games, the boys behind the most overproduced games in existence, announced a reprint of Cosmic Encounter, I was expecting the very reality I know to collapse. After all, we’re hardcore gamers now and things like luck-based games are beneath us.

So why didn’t the world end? Because gamers actually wanted this game. These same gamers that love Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassone are suddenly interested in a game that is entirely driven by the heart of the cards. You can’t even choose your own target when it is your turn to attack; it’s all done by the Destiny deck which tells you who you are going to strike. In other words, don’t get friendly with your “allies”, because you might be forced to vaporize their entire race with your death cannons because the cards told you too.

But why would you vaporize your friends, you may ask? Because the entire point of this game is to get 5 foreign colonies and you can do this in a diplomatic fashion or by committing several genocide attempts. Since this game does take place in Space, you have alien powers to work with. These alien powers have a way to break the game apart and cause problems for both you and your “friends.” For example, those Zombies? They can’t die. What about that Loser? He wins by losing the fight. Everyone gets one alien power that does all sorts of wackiness and there are fifty alien powers that come with this game.

As for the game play itself, it’s quite simple. Each turn, you draw from the destiny deck and it will tell you who your target is. So you pick a planet to invade, throw in 1 to 4 ships, and ask people to come join in the invading party. The victim asks for allies as well, in attempts to save his hide. The other players then decide who they want join by sending 1 to 4 ships, or they can just say “screw you guys, I’m going home.” Once everyone has decided who to join or bow out, both the offensive and defensive player put an Encounter card face down. These cards have a fancy big black number on it and once both sides put the cards face down, they are revealed. The winner is the side who has the bigger number after adding all the ships on their side plus the Encounter card.

That’s pretty much the game right there. There are other cards, like Artifact cards that fudge the rules even further and Reinforcement cards that can change the outcome of close battles. Otherwise, the game is literally just “draw a card for your target, throw in ships, invite allies, and get the highest number.” Why does this work?

Because the entire game is about diplomacy. There are many ways to screw around with your neighbor’s heads and with the alien powers in play, people might either ignore, hate, or like you. In fact, being a game made in the 70s, Cosmic Encounter is a very good early example of abusing the metagame.

The other key factor of Cosmic Encounter’s greatness is the opportunity cost and decision making. Your encounter cards, much like the rest of the game, is entirely random. Sometimes you need to figure out on whether or not you should play your strongest card, and get into your opponent’s head if they have strong cards as well. Sometimes you might not even think about your opponent at all, since you have a terrible hand but must use these cards. You can try to take advantage of your terrible cards by inviting allies and sabotage them, but they’ll hold a grudge for the rest of the game. Do you do it, or just play it safe?

It’s these type of diplomatic situations and bluffing that makes Cosmic Encounter such a great game. It’s quite easy to learn if you are a veteran gamer (especially if you are from hail from the CCG) and the alien powers make the game have an incredible amount of replayability. The base game alone comes with fifty alien, which is more than enough to keep you occupied for a very long time.

Pros:
- Nice artwork
- Easy to learn rules
- Tons of replayability
- Screwing over your friends is encouraged

Cons:
- Don’t play this with three people
- You will hate this game if you loathe luck

There are very few board game genres out there that elicit feelings of seething hatred and wanton destruction as those that include “diplomacy” or “negotiation”. There’s just something about a game that forces you to make tough decisions that WILL affect your friends at the table that can cause things to get ugly. Fun, but oh-so-ugly.

At any given point in the game you may be allied with everyone at the table, joined at the hip to stop the malicious onslaught of the evil “Mutant” horde or “Clone” flotilla. Before you know it you’re ready to jump across the table and stab one of your former “allies” in the neck with a pencil for blatantly drop kicking you in the sack, “with authora-tah”. Alliances of convenience, unabashed betrayal, and sneakery of the highest order…such is the game of Cosmic Encounter.

This game has been around in various iterations since the Seventies, which should speak to its staying power. It has been printed by no less than ten publishers, the best and most recent being the venerable Fantasy Flight Games. This latest version is loaded with high-quality cardboard bits, 100 stack-able plastic UFOs, and a slew of cards and “race sheets”. The game takes about an hour and a half to play, and seats three to five players at a time, which is a good thing because odd numbered crowds generally make people think twice before starting a brawl. In my experience, four to five players are optimum as three player games end up having two team up and bash the third to death. There can be shared wins in this game, meaning that if two players simultaneously meet the victory condition, they both win.

The concept of this game is really quite simple: you are a space-faring race in possession of five colonies in your home system. The object is to use diplomacy, negotiation, or sheer unrelenting force to expand into five foreign colonies. It sounds simple, but this actually as hard as cutting a bad tooth out of a rottweiler with a broken beer bottle. Which happens to be all fun and games until someone gets bit.

Once all the players’ races have been selected, the gameplay consists of several sequential phases that indicate the who, how, and what you get to do during a turn. First, a player will draw a colored card from the “Destiny Deck”, which indicates the color of the foreign race they’ll be assaulting next. That’s right, you don’t get to decide who you attack, it’s decided for you; which can make alliances very tricky. Next, you will indicate which foreign colony of the chosen color you’ll be invading, and how many ships you’ll commit to the fray by placing them on the stargate board.

Now that you’ve established the who and how many, the true fun of the game begins! At this point, the two players about to engage in battle can ask any number of players at the table to ally with them. Common tactics for asking include pleading, offering cards or use of special powers to help the allies. It can also include things like offering to get up and mix a Tom Collins for all allied players. Trust me, I’ve offered that, and worse.

Once the allies are selected, the attacker and defender both choose a card from their hand to play, and reveal them simultaneously. Generally, the higher card wins. There are some specific cards and powers that can change the outcome, such as reinforcement cards that any player may play to help one side or another. Once all cards and powers have been resolved, the winner takes their spoils, and the losers take their devastated forces to the proverbial “sin bin” of Cosmic Encounter, “The Warp”.

There is also a negotiation aspect to the game when it comes to the battle itself. If both the attacker and defender play a “Negotiate” card when they flip their cards, all allies go back to their home systems and the two parties have one minute to strike a deal of any kind, provided something changes hands. If no deal can be reached, they both lose three ships to “The Warp”. The rules specifically state that deals can be anything, so offering a ten dollar bill is not out of the question.

The spoils for the attacker’s side is that you take the planet as a colony; your allies may join you on the devastated planet bringing them closer to the five victory points needed to win. If the defender and their allies win, the defender gets to keep their planet and the allies get to draw some cards from the draw deck. With little exception, the only way to get new cards is to ally with a defending player – which is crucial. The opposing problem with that is that the only way to get victory points, meaning foreign colonies, is to either defeat a planet alone, or to ally with an attacker.

This is truly one of my all-time favorite games, and if you enjoy games that involve planning, tough decisions, trickery, and potentially having your wife tell you, “That’s SO messed up, Pete, you’re SO not getting any tonight”, this is certainly the game for you. If your wife is calling you Pete, and your name is NOT Pete, then it seems that you should not be playing games at all, and perhaps should seek council from a licensed therapist. That, and I am NOT the Pete she called you, I swear.

Things I liked:
*Great gameplay mechanics, quite a fluid experience
*No downtime as everyone is doing something
*High production values and extraordinary art, even for Fantasy Flight Games
*Incredible replayability, and an expansion set, “Cosmic Incursion” to boot

Things I detested:
*$59.99 MSRP is just too bloody high. There’s lots of bits, but this is not Descent: Journeys in the Dark
*The Fantasy Flight Games version is not truly compatible with other publishers’ versions

Overall:
This is an outstanding game for three to five players, and every person who likes player vs. player games should absolutely, unequivocally own this game.

Rating:
5/5 Stars

Cosmic Encounter was first released in 1977 and has since been released serveral times in different editions. The last edition, the one I have reviewed here, was published in 2008 by Fantasy Flight Games. Cosmic Encounter is a game for 3 – 5 players for the ages of 12 and up.

Now that we are done with the pleasantries lets get down to the meat and potatoes of the game. Cosmic Encounter can best be described as a poker game with space ships.
The basics of the game are quite simple; each player begins the game with 20 space ships, which are shaped like old-school saucers designed to stack, divided evenly amongst the players 5 home planets. Each players also begin the game with a hand of 8 cards, most of which are encounter cards and some of which are special action cards.

A game round begins with the active player drawing a card from the destiny deck. This deck contains 3 cards of each player colour currently in the game and some wild cards. The colour of the drawn card tells you which player you have to attack that round. The player has no choice in this, he must attack the player of the colour drawn from the destiny deck. This is a genius design of the game. Since you must attack a player and the choice of who to attack is random the game will not break down into a bash the leader game. Since there’s also an even distribution of the colours in the destiny deck every player will be attacked an equal ammount of times during the game.

The attacker then selects the planet he wants to attack amongst the home planets of the player drawn from the destiny deck. He then takes 1 to 4 of his space ships and places them on the hyperspace gate and points it at the target planet. The defender must defend with all of the space ships he currently has on that planet, or none if he has no space ships present.

Now this is where the fun part of the game begins. After the launch phase we come to the alliance phase. This is where the attacker and defender try to get the other players to ally themselves with them. The reason you want to ally yourself with an attacking or defending player is not because you’re a nice person and want to help them or because you have struck a previous alliance. The reason you want to help a player is because you want to get rewarded. By helping the attacking player and winning the battle you will gain a colony on the defending planet together with the attacking player. This is important because the player who first gets 5 colonies on 5 different enemy planets wins the game. The reward for helping the defending player is first and foremost in stopping the other players from gaining colonies and thereby getting closer to victory. The other reason is that if the defense wins the defending allies get to draw new cards from the deck and put them in their hand. This is important since this is the only way of gaining new cards other then drawing a new hand after you have played all your cards.

When all the players have decided on who, if at all, they will ally themselves with we come to the planning phase. The attacking player and the defending player each select and place face down on the table one card each from their hand. Usually this will be an encounter card with a number on it. Each player them simultaneously reveals their card. The winner of the battle is the player with highest numbered card pluss the number of space ships he attacked with pluss the number of space ships his allies decided to commit to the battle. There are other cards to be played here, like the negotiation card which admits defeat but gives the losing player compensation. However the negotiate card screws over his allies as they lose the battle as well but they do not collect compensation. This really gives the game a lot of oppertunity for bluffing and sticking it to the other players. Hence why it’s been likened to a game of poker.

If the attacker won he’s allowed to take a second turn immediately if he so desires. The round then goes to the next player and the game continues in this fashion untill one player can claim victory by having 5 colonies on foreign planets.

This is the very basics of the game. The cards you get will alter gameplay drastically as they bend the rules of the game. But the thing that really makes this game shine are the alien races. There are 50 different races in the game. Each race has their own special abilities which change the rules of the game. Some of the races only changes the rules slightly, such as the Humans who get a +4 bonus to their revealed encounter card. Then there are races who dramatically changes the rules of the game, such as the Anti-Matter which wins battles if he has the lowest number revealed. These racial abilities makes the game different every time you play it and is what really makes this game so much fun.

So what do I think of Cosmic Encounter? I think it’s one of the greates board games ever made. It’s awsome gathering a few friends around the table and trying to bluff them into playing the card that will spell their certain doom. Having a cold drink while fiddeling with you space ships like they where poker chips pondering how to best make your opponent believe that the sole card you are holding is a 30 and not the measly 3 that it really is. There is almost constant player interaction in this game because of the alliance system and because the cards in your hand can still affect the game even when it’s not your turn. If you enjoy games with random setup, the alien race abilities, and a space theme with a healthy dose of bluffing then this is the game for you. There is only one game in my collection I have played more then Cosmic Encounter and that is Bang! But this is only because we play Bang! about 5 times or more every time we sit down to play it. So I would encourage everyone to atleast try to play Cosmic Encounter once. I promise you that you will want to play it again.

Think Dominion is like multiplayer solitaire? Feel like your choices aren’t having any real impact on the game? Look no further than Cosmic Encounter. This sci-fi game is loaded with bluffing, conspiring, diplomacy, and “Take That!”

Each player starts with 20 ships, divided evenly amongst 5 home planets. It is each players goal to be the first person with ships on five planets owned by other players. To do so, players will have to either make a successful attack or deal with their opponent for the turn, determined by a Destiny deck. This brilliant mechanics ensures players never feel bad about attacking other players, and grudges to be inexcusable.

Each player is assigned a special alien power, that alters how certain mechanics of the game work. Some of these powers are generally better than others, but thankfully each time a player has an encounter with another, players can ally themselves with offense or defense. In this way, players can gang up on a winning player, keeping everyone even.

Cosmic Encounter is simply a great game. No two games ever feel the same, with 50 different alien powers, and no two players having the same play style. One complaint: The game supports 3-5 players, but playing with three is a real drag. It can be moderately fun, but it often feels like players are too much at the whim of the luck of the draw. This is diminished when playing with more people.

An extremely easy to learn game. Go out there and capture 5 planets! But each subsequent game can add a new mechanic into the wheel that is cosmic encounter. Now artifacts, now technologies, now flare cards.

“So TheBrokenTrees, in what way is this game like a Wheel” I hear you ask!
Because the rules are constantly changing with each game. You can never guarantee which 5 aliens will be picked, nor which players will aid who in the coming conflicts. Even player alliances cannot hinder the Wheel that is Cosmic Encounter, which just rolls right over them. Red and Green have stoically aided one another in the previous two battles? Too bad, this turn the game has set them against one another and they will have to come to blows. I can happily say that I have never played a game of this that become tedious because it mirrored a previous game.
I would have given this game a 6/5 on the ‘Replay Value’ scale if boardgaming.com would have let me.

I can find no fault with the game length either, which, in a manner that is perfect for a gateway game, comes in usually at 60 – 90 minutes. Just writing this review makes me want to invite you over and play this game with you!

As a last note, I’m not one that usually subscribes to the buying of expansions. Why bother when you can buy a whole new game? But I’d give these ones a look if you enjoy the main game.