Why I Like Cosmic Encounter

Illuminati minus all the bullshit

I enjoy Illuminati. The mechanics are solid, if a bit simplistic, the player interaction is swell, and it's definitely in the running for best theme ever (YMMV, depending on your love of conspiracy theory and controversial knowledge). But I rarely play it, for the simple reason that it takes a fucking eon. Part of this is bookkeeping: collecting money, spending money, shuffling it around, making change; part of it is table talk - the whining and cajoling and promises of support to one side or the other; and the lion's share is how anyone within spitting distance of a win condition gets dogpiled by all the other players, exhausting their resources and letting the second place runner walk to the win, or possibly third place if fate is exceptionally fickle. Overall, a soup-to-nuts game of Illuminati can take four or five hours, and that's assuming that everyone involved knows what they're doing.

Also, the game's art is a) fantastic and b) features jokes like this.

Cosmic Encounter features all the things I like about Illuminati - politicking, sudden reversals, a simple system leading to complex results and a metric assload of possibilities - filed down to the razor point. Originally released in 1977, the game has gone through five different publishers and has a thriving community of grognards* to attest to how time and revision have done nothing to dampen its elegance. A game of Cosmic takes about an hour and contains the same amount of plotting, backstabbing and "No, fuck you"s as an Illuminati game four times as long.

The basics of Cosmic are clever enough, the kind of game you hope you could come up with if stuck in a mountain cabin with a deck of cards, a bunch of counters, and a group of friends who don't care for poker. Each player has five planets and 20 ships (the ships are cute little 50s saucers that stack equally cutely). Each turn, the offensive player draws a card from the Destiny deck to determine which player he will encounter, and sends one to four ships to meet'n'greet on one of the defensive player's planets. They then both ask for assistance from the other players - Anyone who's invited to can tag along on the invasion or try to defend the planet, depending who called on them. The offense and defense then each pick a card from their hand, play them facedown, and then reveal them.

The hand mechanic encourages strategy- each player gets eight cards, but they have to use all their encounter cards before they can get a new hand, so more isn't necessarily better. There are two types of encounter cards, attacks and negotiates. An attack has a value which is added to the number of ships on that player's side, and the higher total wins, destroying all of the other side's committed ships. A negotiate (essentially, "I come in peace") loses to any attack, but the losing player gets to take cards from the winner's hand equal to the number of ships they lost as compensation; so if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well get something for it. If both players play negotiates, they have one minute to make a deal or both lose three ships. There are many devious ploys to be had with this simple setup, such as trying to convince your opponent you want to negotiate and then shanking him with a low attack card, blasting a foe you know is going to play a negotiate with a high attack card to prevent them from getting it as compensation (or conversely using a negotiate to make an opponent waste a good attack), and a personal favourite, convincing one or more opponents to ally with you and then dropping a negotiate - You all lose your committed ships, but only you get anything for them. Not the kind of trick that works twice in one game, or earns you a lot of friends. But as Pope Boniface said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Winning as the offense gets you a colony on the attacked planet - both for the main player and all of his allies. Gain five colonies outside your home system and you win the game, easy as that. Winning as a defensive ally gains you extra cards, or gets back ships you lost before (the defensive main player himself gets no reward aside from keeping his planet) . Of course, either way you risk losing your ships and getting bupkis for them, so players won't want to get involved with every encounter.

And this.

That's the steak (and not a bad steak, either) but the sizzle is that every player gets a power that breaks these basic rules in some fundamental way. The Oracle can make their opponent reveal an encounter card before choosing their own, the Loser can make whoever loses win and vice-versa (but has to decide to do so before playing cards), and the Zombie doesn't die (a power that seems ludicrously broken until you note that it means he can't receive compensation for negotiating, the only sure way to get new cards if people won't let you ally). If a player loses three home colonies, they lose their power, making a full-offense strategy dangerous. Adding to these powers are a class of cards called Flares, each keyed to a particular alien, which either give another player a "wild" knockoff version of that alien's power or, if held by the player of that alien, supercharge it, and which can be reused. The core of the gameplay is in these powers (regular, wild and super), their use and interaction, and how this affects player interactions, threat perception and plotting.

As mentioned, despite the dizzying number of interactions (with the 90 aliens released thus far, there are over 5 trillion possible 7-player games), the base game is incredibly fast and simple to play; the straightforward scoring of offworld colonies (and the low number needed to win) makes it easy to grasp who's in the lead, but the Destiny deck's randomization of encounters makes it difficult to directly attack the leader, encouraging negotiations (or the negotiation-related shenanigans I mentioned earlier) between other players. The allies getting colonies and the potential of one-minute negotiations means that multiplayer wins are more than possible, they're likely**. The end result is a game that, while fast, has remarkable depth. Since I bought it, I've played it almost every day, I've won exactly half a game, and I'm still utterly obsessed with it.

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* The Cosmic fan community, like game fans generally, is a mixed blessing. While hugely prolific and methodical (CE fansite The Warp has some 1700 alien powers in its catalogue, the bulk of them homebrews), it also teems with the nostalgic elitism and senseless causes one inevitably gets among gatherings of elder beardos. The most notable of these latter are the campaign to reintroduce the "Lucre" money mechanic (an entirely unnecessary addition to the game's economy of ships, cards and colonies, IMHO), the eagerness to bring back certain powers which they admit aren't very fun simply because they were in the first edition, and the seething hatred of a particular alien for being a Calvin and Hobbes reference.

** I can't help thinking that Cosmic would make an excellent game to play for money, if only to provide something more than gamer pride to discourage these kinds of group victories. Then again, handicapping the various alien and their powers would be a herculean task. Better make it nickel-ante.