Cosmic Encounter

When Breaking the Rules Became the Rule

The ‘70s were wild. Counter culture is associated with the 60s but didn’t end there. Shag carpeting. Shagging. In an eighteen month period in ‘72-’73, there were 2,500 bombings in the U.S! Disco! Danger everywhere.

My siblings and I taunted death while rolling around untethered in the back of a station wagon hurtling down the interstate at 55 Miles Per Hour. Not because of the man’s speed limit or the price of gas; it simply couldn’t go faster.

Into this time Eon games published Cosmic Encounter by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, Bill Norton and Peter Olotka. Acquire’s 60s elegance was replaced with … this guy.

Cosmic Encounter Box (Eon Games Edition). Photo by BGG User “Duglis”

At it’s core, Cosmic might seems related to Risk or any “Let’s fight!” games. Instead of a map each player has five planets. On your turn you get one dead alien back, randomly get assigned someone to attack, pick your target, ask for allies and duke it out.

Instead of dice you each played a card from hand. When both sides played a number, add up the cards and aliens. Lower total loses and dies. If you both played compromise card, your allies go home and you had ninety seconds to cut a deal (usually trading bases, but maybe cards or other things). If you tried to compromise, but lost to an number; well, you lose, but steal some cards as compensation.

There’s more, but the rules aren’t that complex …. except every player’s race had a special power that bends (or breaks) the rules.

Seriously … look at that art. Photo by Gary Sonnenberg.

Some are simple: Macron¹ is huge and count as four aliens for combat. Zombie doesn’t die. Laser blinds its opponents, making them play cards at random. Mind can peek at your hand. When fighting Anti-Matter, the lowest total wins. And so on.

Cosmic sold well enough; expansions kept coming and with them came more aliens. The powers got complicated. Gambler could bluff (after you’d revealed your card), and calling Gambler’s bluff meant risking aliens. Judge altered the terms of battle. Sniveler whined when things got too bad; everyone had to agree to let him ‘catch up’ or suffer a penalty.

And sometimes powers got got meta. Schizoid changes the victory conditions. Swindler could pretend to be … a different player.

Invariably this caused questions. Some resolved easily, but timing issues and seemingly paradoxical situations arose. Even though the rules (eventually) covered most situations; but some groups gave each player two (or more!) powers, which created situations the rules never expected.

Groups developed their own meta-rules to handle that.

After my first play, I haunted game stores to find a copy and — when I couldn’t — borrowed a copy and bought hundreds of index cards (of various sizes) to write out by hand all the alien powers and cards. A few years later I found a copy published by West End Games², but that only allowed four players and a dozen or two powers. I kept hunting.

Over the course of multiple stores (in multiple cities) I eventually bought a complete ‘Eon’ set — not only the core game (not too hard to find) but all nine separate expansions, often finding my treasure buried in a"forgotten games bin” in a zip lock bag.

More aliens didn’t necessarily increase complexity; but just added variety. But the expansions also added money (“Lucre”) and Moons and special hexes, wilder event cards, special tiles in the destiny deck and new types of cards like kickers or flares³.

More complexity, still we played, with multiple powers per player.

Our sessions eventually crashed with Boggle Cosmic: Each player picked five powers they wanted to have (out of Eon’s 75 published powers) and 10 to ban. If a power you wanted wasn’t on any other list, you got.

This was a tactical game on it’s own, but after a few of those …. nobody suggested Cosmic Encounter. I didn’t play again for a decade.

Eventually, the itch returned.

Cosmic wasn’t the first game where each player has a unique power. Asymmetric games like Fox And Hounds go back centuries, and BoardGameGeek lists over 16,000 games with Variable Player Powers, but Cosmic is the first modern boardgame that gets remembered⁴.

That make Cosmic worthy of consideration for the 20th Century Project, but it’s still back in print and being played today. When someone suggested it I pushed back against multiple powers and thankfully that set didn’t have the more esoteric expansions. The base game worked great and reminded me why I’d put all that effort into building my copy.

Even if you ignore Cosmic’s “Twist” of variable alien powers, the rules cleverly handle problems in multiplayer games of aggression. The destiny deck means you can’t attack just pick on the weakest player (or the one whose power is worthless against yours). Allying provides concrete benefits, so much so that knowing when not to ask for allies is important. There are negotiations and alliances; multiple players can win.

Many games handle multi-player poorly, Cosmic tackled it well and innovated. All of which is why I consider Cosmic Encounter a first-ballot entry.

1. The Alien, not the French Leader.

2. Ignoring non-English editions, Cosmic was published by Eon, West End Games, Mayfair Games, Games Workshop and — most recently — by Fantasy Flight Games. There are also

3. Kickers are additional cards played during combat that provided a multiplier to the base cards. Flares are event cards that didn’t automatically get discarded after use and also varied depending on which power you had. For example, if you played the Zombie Flare, you’d get a minor (“wild”) power if you weren’t Zombie, and a major (“Super”) power if you were.

4. In a discussion during Cosmic Encounter’s entry into the Board Game Geek Hall of Fame, Dan Blum suggested Dynasty may be the first modern game. I’d never heard of it.