It was a 4 player game instead of a full 6 player one, which helped
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There used to be a full group at my LGS that would play one Saturday a month and it was pretty much always a 14 hour+ game.
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Iâm going to put forth Cosmic Encounter as a pretty great game if you already have a dedicated group ready to go!
You play as an alien race vying for control of the galaxy by way of establishing colonies on other planets, which youâll do either by beating them in a straight up contest or by negotiating with them. This is done through a pretty simple War-esque game where each of you plays a card face down and the result is based on whether you and the opponent played an attack or negotiate card â 2 attacks mean you resolve the conflict based on the number of each playerâs attack card + number of ships contributed, attack vs. negotiate means attack wins automatically but the negotiator gets to collect some compensation, and 2 negotiates mean you and your opponent must negotiate a result that both of you agree with under a minute, or else both of you lose ships.
What makes Cosmic Encounter really interesting is the alien powers you receive â you get to select one of two randomly dealt powers at the beginning of the game (from a pool of like 70), and each power essentially breaks some part of the combat system. For instance, thereâs an alien race where rather than adding your ships to the number of your attack card, youâll multiply the two! And one where youâll actually flip the numbers on each attack card around, so if your opponent plays a 40, (one of the higher values in the game) it becomes 04, etc. Thereâs also one where if both of you attack each other and you lose, you actually win.
The game actually forces you into encounters at the beginning of your turn. You draw a card that tells you who youâre dealing with that turn, so it avoids the typical âwho should I deal withâ posturing that can drag a turn out and brings the playersâ focus toward the actual encounters themselves, which are what the game centers around.
I do find that this game is a little tough to teach to an entirely new group of people who arenât necessarily familiar with each other, as thereâs a sense of apprehension with using these crazy-overpowered abilities against people they donât know, so itâs definitely not the first game I bring out on a night. But usually I play with my brother and cousins, so itâs really easy to jump into when playing with them. The alien powers change the game dynamic really dramatically each game and the game moves quickly enough to get 2-3 games done in an hour if youâre efficient about it.
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I admit to never having played Cosmic Encounter for a few reasons:
- Iâm really suspicious of games with high randomness and high power differentials between players. I admit they can be very fun with the right set of people and the right attitude but it isnât normally what I look for in board games
- It was a major influence on Magic the Gathering and thus all CCGs, and ancient, intentionally unbalanced exception based rules tend to make me mad at the game instead of rolling with how ridiculous the game has gotten. Itâs like why I donât dig on CVS2
So, Iâm willing to try it out, I suppose (Itâs one of the few games to have an official DLC release on tabletop sim, even, which means I would have to buy it but it might be worthwhile for me at the very low digital price)
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Iâve played a bunch of Cosmic Encounter, itâs mindless filler that you can play drunk. The modern analogue would be Small World (but I strictly prefer A Brief History of the World for my random-placement-power 2 hours of smash & be smashed by friends).
@Tulpa what about modern intentionally unbalanced exception-based rules? Gods I miss Glory to Rome.
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Yeah, I probably should have done a better job of making clear the big caveat of it only being fun with the right group â everyone needs to âbuy inâ to some extent, and be ok with dealing with the huge swings of board states that can happen with the game. Itâs weird because when I first heard of the game it was touted (by Shut Up & Sit Down, which might explain a lot) as a game that anyone can get into, but when I tried to teach it to my board game-leaning friends, they didnât warm up to it as much as I thought they would. A big reason why itâs one of my favorites is because it fits really well with the group I play with most, so there you go.
As far as its influence on M:tG, I actually didnât know that! It does explain a lot about M:tGâs design that I really dislike with relation to its tournament-oriented audience (being âallowedâ to play a card doesnât make me feel great about playing) but itâs forgiven for me in Cosmic Encounter because the game seems to embrace its unbalanced nature as opposed to trying to ignore it. The game also makes clear the differences between the players; the powers are fully known as the game starts, which means I can intuit the possible outcomes of whatever interactions we have, but I donât know which outcome youâll want to go for. I do understand the issue with exception-based design creating unique experiences though â Race for the Galaxy does it in a more elegant way with its enormous deck that players make a tableau from, fostering a sense of âdiscoveryâ as opposed to imba for imbaâs sake, but thereâs a lot of warmth in Cosmic Encounter that is hard to find in other games, and Iâll fully concede that itâs probably just my own experience with my own group that gives me that feeling.
I guess Iâm just a Cosmic Encounter apologist in the end >_>
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me and my friends play boardgames every sunday. the games that get the most play are dominion, marvel legendary and splendor.
marvel legendary is like dominion, except itâs a co-op game about superhero/villain battles. splendor is a game about collecting and spending temporary gems so you can buy permanent gems that sometimes come with victory points attached. it also creates a weird tense silence while itâs being played.
but between us, weâve all bought piles and piles of games that are all in my front room, and one of those is web of gold. itâs a kids game from the late 80s about an abandoned mine and giant spiders and it looks like this:
whatâs cool about it is how everything slots together. while playing, webs slot between rock pillars, caught explorers slot onto webs, and spiders slot on top of rock pillars. each player also has a card lantern, which itself has things that slot into it to indicate lantern fuel and remaining life. AND thereâs slots round the edges of the board for keeping cards, webs, the die, and so on. itâs all amazingly well designed.
the game itself is also pretty good, too. in a turn, a player moves their explorer and rolls to see if they found items or gold. then they move their spider, and place webs between the rock pillars. the explorers can get through the webs by rolling higher than the number on them (which is 3 by default, and can be increased by persistant spiders). an explorer caught in a web can also be bitten by a spider. four bites and the explorer is out of the game.
the winner is either the first explorer to bring six gold nuggets back to their base camp, or the last explorer to die. itâs a fun, competitive game full of backstabbing and general meanness, which are both things i like in board games. (i also love games about lying, but thatâs a story for another time)
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If you havenât, definitely check out Legendary Encounters: Alien. I actually really like that one. It feels like a definite, marked improvement on Marvel Legendary. Plus you can put superheroes on the nostromo because it is backwards compatible.
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itâs definitely a game we want, but unfortuantely, the legendary games are really expensive over here because they arenât technically released outside america because of licencing nonsense. (though somehow that hasnât stopped us getting literally every expansion)
knowing that itâs backwards compatible makes it more attractive though, and insane as it sounds conceptually!
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Just played another game of Race for the Galaxy tonight. Every time I play, it goes a bit faster. I kept drawing developments that made playing develop every turn beneficial, which unfortunately made the game very heavily biased in my favor, the game ending because I filled up my tableau in about 12 turns.
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My current favorite heavyweight is probably Food Chain Magnate, the latest release by Splotter Spellen. The players are running competing fast food chains, building up their corporate structures from scratch by hiring employees and training them to higher positions. You have to run marketing campaigns to create demand for your products, and then you actually have to produce those products to sell via cooks and truck drivers. Of course, other players can easily snipe demand from you if youâre not watching out.
It has a definite Dominion influence; there are cards that let you play more cards ie villages/managers, and then there are the cards that actually do stuff. The big difference is the presence of a variable map in setup, and that you control exactly which cards you play from your deck every turn, not to mention there are essentially in-game achievements that give players permanent bonuses for being the first to do certain things (eg first player to train an employee gets a $15 discount on salaries for the rest of the game). I donât really consider it a problem, but itâs also an incredibly unforgiving game in the sense that a single mistake can basically render you out of the game.
Iâve also been a big fan of Keyflower lately. Itâs a more medium-weight game thatâs a combination of auctioning, worker placement, tile-laying and pick-up and deliver mechanics. Itâs great and relatively fast at all player counts (2-6), and it is goddamn savage. The game takes place across four seasons, and each season a certain number of tiles are placed down that players can bid on to add to their village. You can bid with three different colors of workers (red, blue, yellow), but once you bid with a color, the tile is locked to that color for the rest of the season. You can also use workers to activate tiles for their printed benefit, but doing so also locks that tile to that color for the rest of season, for both activation and bidding purposes. Not to mention that youâre allowed to use tiles in anyoneâs village. Like I said, the game gets absolutely savage in later seasons.
Tash Kalar is awesome, and free to play on board game arena to boot. Super excited for the Nethervoid expansion coming out soon.
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Please play Tash Kalar with me. I still havenât had a chance to play and I donât want to play with randos on BGA because Iâve heard theyâre generally REALLY good and would just destroy me.
Iâve heard a little bit about both FCM and Keyflower and would love to play both at some point.
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Yea, Iâm always up for TK. My name is nodocchi on BGA if you ever want to throw me an invite.
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Iâve been so busy lately but Iâd love to play games with you guys sometime. Any good ones that donât take took long?
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I played Space Hulk yesterday, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Completely isolated board gaming is great.
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Got in my first play of Richard Breeseâs new game, Inhabit the Earth. Itâs completely different than any of his Key games, and Iâm not sure whether I actually like it or not yet. Itâs a tableau builder where each player is trying to build up to six different tableaus of cards, each tableau representing different groups of animals, and create a movement engine to race each other on six different continent boards. Each card comes with three icons on it: one representing its animal class, one with a continent, and one with a terrain type. Matching animal classes in the same tableau lets you draw more cards, terrain helps you move through matching terrain on the race tracks, and if the continent that animal is on matches a continent icon in the tableau, it can act as a terrain wildcard. What complicates icon matching somewhat is that each card also has a special ability, generally either helping you draw cards, allowing you to spend fewer cards to do stuff, giving you some movement flexibility, or giving you points at the end of the game. Basically, it is weirdly complicated and not in a way I think is necessarily good. Itâs rather hard to plan ahead since youâre highly subject to shuffle luck, both on special abilities and necessary icons, and the icons are kind of a pain in general. Not to say it was all bad, but definitely a let down after Keyflower.
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I played Race for the Galaxy a few times, it made me think I didnât like economic engine games until I tried London.
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What did you dislike about RftG?
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One thing I didnât have in my collection until recently was a custom dice-placement game such as Roll for the Galaxy (I prefer Race), Nations: The Dice Game, or Tiny Epic Galaxies. While I like all of those games, I wasnât sure I needed to own any of them. In a recent sale, I picked up Discoveries. I think I like it the best of any such game I have played.
One way in which Discoveries differs from others Iâve tried is that you end up using your dice, other playersâ dice, and neutral dice. Using other playersâ dice can be helpful but risky because thereâs a retrieve action that can be taken at any time. That makes for some fun strategy. The game also has nice artwork.
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You know, the usual: multiplayer solitaire & those symbols.