What do you guys think the upcoming expansion will hold? (Disclaimer - I have never played Eon, Mayfair, or Cosmic Online; my opinions are naive).

According to this thread we'll be treated to fifty new aliens! Obviously that would entail fifty new flare cards. The base game comes with seven grudge counters - enough to accommodate a nine player game. So I figure we'll either get six through nine in the expansion, or six and seven now with eight and nine in a second expansion.

With more players, we'll need (just a couple) more encounter, artifact, and reinforcement cards to balance the extra flares in the deck. (I would vote for a second Morph)! We will also require more wild and special destiny cards to balance the extra colours.

Of course rules for hazards (as suggested on page seven of the rules) would add variety to the destiny deck without more wilds and specials (FFG, assuming this is their innovation, are geniuses). But there is no reason to say we won't see some new specials anyway . In fact page twelve of the rules suggests a special destiny card that designates his/herself as defense. Currently all the specials specify another player.

The obvious specials I predict are one to attack the opponent with the most home colonies, and one which attacks an opponent's foreign colony. I would expect the latter to be akin to a wild (attack any foreign colony anywhere ), but specifying any foreign colony in a particular system would be cool too and would better conform with the comment on page twelve. Perhaps we'll get one "attack a foreign colony" card for each system and one such wild card. I suppose we could get destiny cards specifying a specific player but in any foreign colony too. In any case I guess you'd draw again if there was no qualifying colony to attack.

I would personally also like to see more tech cards please! Also a gold or silver (or otherwise marked) saucer for the Prometheus - preferably (slightly) lager, but not necessarily. Great job FFG, keep up the awesome work!

Not to be a party pooper, but where has FFG actually said they would put 50 more aliens into the expansion? As far as I can tell people just keep quoting other threads that refer to rumors someone heard from their brother's friend's cousin. Or something

AFAIK, FFG hasn't officially announced *anything*. Even the name "Cosmic Incursion" is just a rumor. Kevin Wilson said in an early Board Game Geek thread before the main game came out that a 6th player would be in the 1st expansion and that the Sniveler was on the short list for the expansion aliens. Other than that we just have speculation.

50 more aliens would indeed be cool. But we don't even know how big the expansion will be. Will it come in box as big (and as expensive) as the main game and be filled with about as much? Will they sell individual booster decks? Will it come in Silver Line games sized "medium" boxes with 15-25 aliens, another color worth of plastic ships & a deck of cards? We just don't know.

There is a lot of other stuff from the old editions of the game that might be brought back, and who knows how many expansions are coming?

Peter has blabbed on CEO that Cosmic Encursion (yes, he used that name) will have 20 aliens. Now, that was two months ago, but I see no reason for that to change too drastically.

Jhamin said:

They haven't. It seems to be a "fact" quoted repeatedly from what was originally a "wish list" thread. And now it's gaining a life of its own.

I seriously doubt an expansion is going to reach the same level of aliens as the original set. Not gonna happen.

I heard it will have 50 million aliens. But my source has been known to make mistakes. From time to time.

I don't expect any huge surprises: 25 aliens, 1 or 2 additional player sets, hazards, and probably not much else. But that would of course be more than enough for me.

I've already played six-player games, and we haven't had problems with the deck, so I don't expect too many new encounter cards if any. Once we had to use the Cosmic Quake rule from the FAQ (I felt bad about this because I hadn't warned anyone about the rule in advance, and they all thought I made it up!), but that was less due to there being six-players and more due to the fact that we were in a nearly three-hour game with lots of defensive allying and some card-hogging aliens.

I also suspect it will be closer to what Adam said (incidently, that is my name as well) ----

20 - 30 aliens, a 6th player, hazards, possibly another Morph card, maybe a few new Techs

I don't know how long it'll be before we get some news on an expansion, and although people seemed to be burned out on the boards (not as much posting or home-brews anymore) I still have plenty of fun with the base game, so an expansion will be a nice surprise whenever one gets released. Besides, it would seem that FFG has plenty on their plate right now with Ad Astra, Warhammer, Chaos all in the works.

I am hoping there is an announcement or preview or something at Gen Con...

I just bought my 4 day pass, and I am looking forward to going (first time ever for me).

LUCRE!!! I'd love to see Lucre, and a slew of aliens that use it (like the Pirate, Butler, Lloyd, and Dragon), though I don't know what Kevin's thoughts of Lucre are on the game.

For those that don't know the EON version, Lucre was effectively 'money'. Each player started with 4, and you gained one at the Start Turn phase. You could spend it to buy tokens from the warp or extra cards during your turn. In a challenge, unspent lucre was added to the totals on your side (i.e. to total your side, it's your tokens + allies + card + lucre). Pretty simple rules, but created some very interesting powers. For example: the Dragon. Instead of paying the 'bank' to get cards/tokens, you paid the Dragon. So this player would quickly have a bunch of lucre. The Pirate allowed you to attack a players Lucre instead of one of their planets. etc.

Aside from Lucre, a 6th player would be coming soon, if not this expansion then the next. More than 6 players is *really* rough to play (long/slow/borring game), so I don't think they'd add more in later expansions. You might see planet variations, similar to the 9th Eon expansion (like one large planet instead of 5 small ones, rings, etc). I know Kevin has said he likes the small planet pieces, giving him ideas for future expansions.

And of course powers. FIFTY?!? That would be *amazing* but I highl doubt it. Getting powers just right is the trickiest part of this game. 20 sounds about right for an expansion. Some of the original EON expansions only had 10 or so. I'd love to see the Terrorist again

-shnar

I'd definately rather have moons over Lucre any day; lucre really dampened losses. It felt like nothing really mattered; you lost cards, buy em, lost tokens, buy em. Too boring of a mechanic, however fantasy flight does seem to have done a good job (i say seem cuz i have yet to get my FFG version in the mail yet) spiffing up the rules/powers to make them more balanced, perhaps they'd make a new series of rules around lucre to make it more fun and less of trivializing your losses.

Moons on the other hand just made the game crazier and gave the schizoid another thing to make rules about as well as being game changing. Also it was really nice to havethem marked as quarter moons/half moons/full moons/new moons to distinguish how game changing they were. That way we could say we wanted to remove the new moons/full moons if we wanted too (new moons were worthless and full moons were extremely game changing, one even just won you the game automatically). Moons really added to the craziness of things and that what made them so fun. One example is that one moon was like a crashing moon, and it would smash a planet in that system and replace that planet, and all those existing tokens on the planet would go to the warp.

Oh, and of course MORE POWERS! Obviously =P Seriously, as many powers as they can possibly fit into one expansion pack is how many they should put =P.

Ugh, we hated moons and ended up never playing with them. They really just distracted from the game. Lucre, on the other hand, didn't do much to delay the game, and you only got 4 +1/turn, so it's not like you could do a whole lot with them. You get one token from the warp per turn, this just did the same thing (1 lucre). What I really liked about lucre though was the powers that utilized them. There were a lot of good ones, like the Butler, Pirate, Lloyd, Force, etc.

Course, knowing Kevin, he will probably introduce some completely new rules that we've never seen before

-shnar

Moons > Lucre, any day of the week.

tech < moons and lucre

any news from gencon?

But you talk about making the game last a LOT longer, Moons do that over Lucre all the time. At least with Lucre, you're still winning bases and the game progresses nicely.

Give me my lucre!!!

-shnar

My only expectation is an expansion comming this year. Please? =x

shnar said:

I will admit, a resource gathering element is probably a lot more comfortable to introduce than an entire mechanic based off of "whatever random power-esque game effects are feasibe". While moons may show a lot more creativity (both the good and bad variety), lucre (or something in a similar vein, whatever FFG would call it) would offer an optional strategy structure to Cosmic players who crave just a tad - a TAD - less chaos in their games (or more accurately, a semi-delusional sense of being able to mitigate one's bad luck). Consider Dune (eventually Twilight Imperium: Rex), which came out after CE - it takes CE-ish unique player powers, and then attaches a static map and resource gathering. No real complaints there.

Just weighing the two options in my head. I think the anti-sentiment towards lucre might stem from the notion that it's never really been implemented (in CE) in a way that worked well consistently (Eon didn't give it enough umph, while Mayfair drowned people in it and bogged down play with all the ways in which it could be used). Entries on The Warp make attempts to correct this, and I will definitely have to try them out in future games to see how they are received.

How did the Mayfair version bog players down? (I never played that version)

-shnar

shnar said:

If you check the differences between the Eon and Mayfair lucre rules (on the Warp), the completely unqualified conclusion I came to was that Eon lucre affected the game too little, and Mayfair too much (and so the game became more about Lucre than actually wielding one's power, and made the powers seem paltry).

Not to mention that the valuation of Lucre differs between versions, so you really can't combine ideas from both without some currency conversion. Again, on the Warp, there is an effort by Patrick Riley to revisit and reform Lucre so that it 1) isn't easily acquired, but 2) actually can have some luck-tilting effects by the time the "end-game" is near.

I never played the Eon edition, but as a long time Mayfair player I can easily say I like Lucre more than moons. Lucre is just another resource to manage, same as cards and ships it never really unbalances things (in my experience) or divert attention away from powers. It just adds another wrinkle to the game, with the amount of Lucre one gains being tied to home colonies (+moon colonies in one's own system) it encourages players to more strongly defend their home system and perhaps retake planets from other players more often than they normally would. It also adds another element which can be exchanged in deals, expanding things out from the limiting "cards or planet" kind of deals. Some of the things you can spend it on are obviously more useful than others, a favorite of my group's being the ability to purchase random unused flares from the Flare deck (and with 100 different Flares that can possibly come into play, things can get really hectic and fun), a welcome addition considering how huge the Mayfair challenge deck is and the one-shot Flare rules. Moons are a good way to liven up the game at times but it's always a real crapshoot with them (the rhyming moon gets old real quick).

I suspect if FFG adds Lucre it will be totally reworked and possibly under a new name. Just a hunch.

I could see a new name (seemed that just about everything was renamed in this version, except Flares), but I don't see why they would really rework their usage. They pretty much left all the original components as-is with no reworks...

-shnar

Most of the new terminology in this edition originated in the Avalon Hill version (Encounters, Negotiates, Artifacts, etc.) and I suspect that it was retained for marketing reasons and to appeal to those who had played that version. The change from "tokens" to "ships" and the "cone" to the "hyperspace gate" seems reasonable enough to me as a way of reinforcing the sciencefiction elements of the game. Lucre is a good enough name which fits in alright with the theme since it is an odd but recognizable way to refer to currency (the idea of all cosmic currency being sordid and distasteful and the vague biblical connections make for humorous undertones as well) and is identifiable by the fanbase, so I don't see why they would change it, but then, who knows.

if they would change the name of the currency then i have a solid name

energon

shnar said:

They tweaked a lot of cards, powers, and rules -- and almost exclusively for the better. Flares were greatly revised and I think the rule that you can only play one per turn is new, isn't it? It's been a long time. Lucre got a pretty big overhaul in Mayfair, from what I hear (never played lucre in either set, myself), so I would think the new Lucre, if it is coming at all, would be a compromise between the two versions or something completely different.

It's just a hunch. I'm not basing this off of anything. And I hardly care anyway. I'm not a fan of adding new rules and really just hope for new cards and aliens, personally.

Lucre sound cool. I like the idea that that you're further rewarded to keep home bases. I also like having something extra to trade in negotiations. I wouldn't want to see Lucre become to central to the game though - just another wrench in the system would be fine.

How did the moons work?

Information about moons:

http://redamedia.com/warp/moonplay.php3

http://redamedia.com/warp/eonmoons.php3

http://redamedia.com/warp/maymoons.php3