Well this edition looks very slick.

highlights include

Tech cards. Looks like they increase the amount of token management in the game. Can't wait to give that deck a read!

flare cards remain in a players hand, usable once per encounter. I love this because it will really make hand management critical.

Special destiny deck cards (comets) included in first set.

expansion information

“cone danger” symbol on destiny deck cards, possibly a reverse cone mechanic?

Three more players for a total of 8 (the destiny deck has 8 alien heads on it, five of them in the current player colors, three in presumably the colors of the expansion)

Ah, it's going to be a fabulous Christmas at our house.

TylerT said:

Good find there. Hopefully it's true. Now I just wanna see a complete list of Aliens for the Base game...

webslinger9 said:

(* = brand spanking new)

Add in the aliens that probably won't get left out (at least in my opinion: Amoeba, Calculator, Chronos, Empath, Laser, Mutant, Philantrophist, Trader, Vacuum, Virus, Void, Vulch, Warpish, Will) and you get 37.

TylerT said:

My only worry with this is that the new colours might be too hard to tell apart from the "old" ones. Two new shades of violet making a total of three different violets to keep track of. (The orange one should probably be reasonably easy to tell apart from the yellow. I heard that this was a problem with two of the mayfair colors (dark and light blue).

I don't think Shadow is "brand spanking new" but just a renamed alien. The instructions refer to him as an alien that does something to the tokens of the player drawn by destiny, so I think it is just a renamed Asassin from the original game. Back when there was a planned Xbox Live Arcade version of Cosmic Encounter (it's in "development hell" right now, poor soul), designer Peter Olotka posted a list of all the aliens intended for that version, and several were renamed classics. Terrorist became "Booby," and there were one or two others made more politically neutral. I know Asassin was renamed, but I can't remember if his name was Shadow.

Another interesting hilight for me was the new alien distribution model. The classic rule of completely random draw has been replaced by draw two, choose one. I personally like random draw because it virtually guarantees no alien will ever be left out, even if it happens to be one or two players' least favorite. It helps streamline the flare rule though where you just insert all flares drawn into the deck rather than having to draw again after, not that it's a big deal either way, but sometimes I forget.

Reading the rules makes me feel like it is already here. Cosmic cannot arrive too soon!

I actually don't expect to see all the colors on the back of the Destiny deck used as the player colors... they will probably go with something like Black and/or White in order to be very clear on which player is which.

Maybe the series of three purples is really indigo, purple, and magenta.

But really, an 8-colour set should be red/orange/yellow/green/turquoise/blue/purple/pink. Add in black and white to get ten colours that are completely distinct from one another (maybe even brown and grey).

Shadow = Assassin, no doubt about it.

There's a really good mix of aliens... good classic ones, good new ones... some from CE online, and some from guys who've been playing CE forever and a day and created a pile of their own aliens (guilty as charged). Kevin put a lot of thought into what should be in the initial mix, and what works well for people new to CE. There's a lot of rhyme and reason- using Pacifist instead of Empath makes a lot of sense to me. When you get down to it, it's easy to argue that Empath, while a classic alien, is simply a slightly weaker version of Pacifist. And I know Kevin wanted to hold off on the aliens that take too much control out of the hands of other players (like Laser). 50 is a good number to have in the box, and the really great thing is that there's still a LOT of good aliens that can easily be added in an expansion. They may even have other plans for aliens... I've said too much already!

I am definitely guilty of thinking Empath a weaker Pacifist my first time playing it. But the ability to gain a colony on defense and offense with your power, not to mention the fact that most players underestimate the Empath player, I'd say it earns its keep. Definitely a good decision to keep the two aliens apart in the base set though. Newcomers would probably rarely choose it under the impression it is a weak Pacifist, and they're definitely different shades of the same power. Better to go for variety at first.

On an unrelated note, I remember on the old Cosmic Encounter Online forum a member who was a very prolific alien creator (if not always the best) posted an alien called Countdown. I wonder if it has any relation to this new Tick-Tock, but I don't remember what Countdown did. Ah, I miss that forum.