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.

Why it sucks being a gamer

Trying to write an essay focusing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the war machine makes it extremely easy to slide into thinking about Warmachine, with the result that time better spent trying to root out what the hell those French bastards were on about ends up being spent on "Seriously, there aren't any Trollblood channelers?".

Why I Like Small World

So I bought Small World¹, because it's terrific (hence the W.I.L.), and I also bought the various expansions because, as I've alluded to before, there is a hole in every gamer's heart that can only be filled by having every single possible bit for his chosen money sink². Thankfully, this was all less traumatic to the pocketbook than it could have been, thanks to the good people of Meeplemart, their reasonable (and Canadian!) prices and their startlingly fast delivery. Meeplemart: For when you simply cannot function until you've spent $200 on completely unnecessary Arkham Horror figures³.

Anyway, now that we're done polishing Meeplemart's tackle, on to polishing Small World's. Small World is a game with a spectacular amount of cardboard. There are two boards (with different maps on each side, so you can play with anywhere from 2 to 5 players), there are mountains, there are a bunch of cardboard Race⁴ banners with Generic Fantasy's Greatest Hits on them (You know Orcs, Halflings, Elves and the rest, although the expansions mix it up a bit with such examples of European cultural sensitivity as Gypsies and Pygmies⁵); there are a bunch more power banners, which are marked with adjectives like Flying, Peace-Loving and Marauding, and which fit into a groove on the race banners; there are troll holes and fortresses and dragons, and there are a shedload of little cardboard armies to punch out. Fortunately, the game also gives you a fancy little storage tray for the armies in the main set, and one of the expansions has another for all the ones from the other expansions. We're talking serious cardboard here.

The reason for all this is also the strength of the game: the Basic Rule. To conquer a territory, you need 2 armies, plus one for every bit of cardboard on it, including other armies. That's it. Oh, there's more to it than that - every race has its own power, and the special powers which combine with those, but once you get the Basic Rule you have a good 90% of the game well in hand.

Gameplay consists of buying a race (six races are doled out and given random powers, and as each is bought, another is added), taking over whatever territory you can with it, and taking victory coins equal to your occupied territories, plus bonuses from your race and power. Then other races come along and mess with you. Eventually, your guys will be killed off (when you conquer using the Basic Rule, one of the conquered armies gets discarded, the others get spread around the conqueree's remaining territory) or be spread out too thin, or just get boring, and you can put them into decline so they can continue making sweet victory coins for you while you get a whole new set of assholes to wreck shit up. Whoever's richest at the end of the game wins, just like in real life.

You may have noticed that the Basic Rule has no randomness to it. It's a sheer accounting measure. That's intentional - SW is, as barely mentioned above, from The Europes, which makes it one of those sneaky bastard well-polished Eurogames posing as a brash randomness-besotted Ameritrash game. Except that if you don't have enough troops to take one last territory at the end of your turn, you can roll a die to get temporary reinforcements. And that there's a power that lets you roll it too. And that there's a lot of randomness in how random races are linked to random powers and then arranged in a random order of cost ⁶. The Usual Suspects squabble over what this means and whether and how to remove Demon Unpredictability from their perfect equations, making for another fine example of how Taking It Too Seriously mucks up the fun.

And the game is fun, and fast, and surprisingly complex for all that it uses an icky-poo die. The satisfaction of trouncing an enemy gives way to the misery of being trounced in turn and then to the deliberation as to whether to go for one more landgrab, or put your race into decline and pick a new one next turn. Some power/race combos are legendarily good(/broken), others kinda suck, but they're all different and novel and influence strategy in complex ways. It's a game of Civilization in an hour, and without those crazy-ass wonder videos. So it's a wash, really, but it's a damn fine wash.

Finally, a word on customization. The base game has a black race banner and a blank power banner so you can make up your own, like Illuminati cards. The expansions add some more (and the expansions are largely made up of player-submitted powers and races. As I've said before, every gamer is a game designer). And the game itself inspires ideas at a phenomenal pace - My first game at 7 AM, on Boxing Day with no sleep and a beer in my hand, I was already crawling with ideas. Even the crusty BGGeeks, when they weren't figuring out how to replace the game's only source of randomness with bonus extra-dry strategy, produced some nifty print-and-play expansions. Truly, Small World just keeps getting bigger.<sup>7



1</sup> And in doing so managed to drunkenly break my vow not to buy any more games until I had a job like a real boy.

² Well, not every single bit. I left out the Tales & Legends action deck as a paltry attempt to prove that my dissolution was incomplete, like a drunk intentionally leaving the last swallow of his beer in the glass because that proves he's not an alcoholic.

³ Seriously, the game comes with cardboard standees and bases which have never failed me. All these figures are going to do is make your monster chits look ridiculous running around all Flatland at the 3D-realized feet of your investigators. And then Fantasy Flight comes out with a line of monster figures and oh my God that's brilliant.

⁴ I'd do some bog-standard grumping about how race is incorrect and they should really be species banners, but you can't fight the moonlight or the tide of nerd inertia. Inerdtia. Gygax called 'em races, they're races.

⁵ Those actually are races, which just goes to show. Although there is always that book that White Wolf put out about Gypsies being a separate genetic lineage of magical tricksters. I think it was just after their book on playing the ghosts of Holocaust victims, and just before somebody asked them what in the living fuck they thought they were doing.

⁶ This sentence is more or less just me trying to break my roommate Matt (of Fiasco badass mail-order bride Natasha and homeless cuckolded murderous gay dude fame). For reasons unknown, duder has a broom up his ass about the use of "random", not merely in its use to refer to wacky-loopy-freak-the-mundanes shenanigans (which is, of course, despised by all people of character and spirit), but its use to refer to anything which is at all dependent on anything else. Which leaves us with, I guess, singularities and the Primal Chaos?

⁷ UNBEARABLY TWEE FINAL LINE EXPUNGED. WE APOLOGIZE. TRUST US, THOUGH, IT'S A PRETTY FUN GAME.