I've never played Cosmic Encounter before, but pulled it out tonight and played it most of the way through with some other people, and am a bit disappointed. It isn't that I don't like the game. I've played games I don't like before and haven't minded. It's the fact that this game seems to have needed another couple months playtesting and a better editor.

There are just a bunch of little fiddly mistakes on the cards that have no business being there.

For instance, the Macron card says (I believe) something about after playing an attack card as a main player or an ally, add 1 to your total for each ship. Well, you don't play an attack card as an ally, so the card couldn't apply in that case. So from a strict rules standpoint (the standpoint that I like to adopt whenever possible), this card wouldn't help you as an ally. Obviously, that wasn't the intent, and it's not the way we play, but it is what the card says.

Then again, the Observer ability says that you can launch a ship from the warp as a main player or an ally, but the card says to play it during the launch phase, before you should know if you are an ally or not. Again, that is obviously a mistake, and you should be allowed to play it in either the launch or the Alliance phase, as applicable. But still, it is an error that shouldn't be there.

If it were just a matter of the interactions of abilities not working together, I wouldn't mind. Good heavens, I play Descent! And a bigger pile of special abilities that don't interact in obvious ways and have to be explained in the FAQ would be impossible to find! But these are all isolated errors that aren't affected by anything else; so they rankle a lot because they should have been easy to avoid.

So we have errors on two of the 10 flare cards we are using (possibly more).

Also, the five types of cards (attack, negotiate, morph, artifact, and flare) are not obvious. We played for a part of the game thinking that the card types were Artifact, Flare, and Encounter (which makes sense; the cards say "encounter" at the top where the others say "flare" and "artifact"). It just felt like another messy little detail that could have been done so much better by writing better cards.

And what about reinforcement cards? Would it have been so difficult to say "after the attack cards have been revealed, every player, starting with the offense and going left, has the oppurtunity to play a reinforcement card. Keep going around the table till every player has passed consecutively"? Instead, we spend a few minutes poking about in the rules which said nothing about it before deciding to do this based on the "timing" section.

Also, the special abilities don't seem balanced in relation to each other. Take the Vacuum. You get to send opposing ships to the warp along with your own. It means that if something bad happens to you, you can make it happen to one other player. Nowhere near as good, imo, as allowing something good to happen to you to try to prevent the bad things. Getting +1 and everyone else getting +0 is a lot better than getting -1 and causing one other player to get -1. I think that of the five we are playing (the Vulch, the Observer, the Trader, the Reserve, and the Vacuum), the Vacuum are clearly the worst. It is true that our player could use them better than he is, by using threats and intimidation (if you don't support me, I'll suck you into the warp with me! MWAHAHAHA!), but still. The Observer has a good argument for supporting him, and can support others basically at no risk. The Trader can dump a hand of worthless cards, the Reserve can win basically any small card war, and the Vulch get to use every artifact in the deck at least once!

And looking through some of the other cards, I also got the feeling that some were much more/less powerful than others. Now, I don't usually jump to declare something imbalanced (I was one of the last who stoutheartedly insisted that Road to Legend wasn't horribly imbalanced). I usually test things out thoroughly and try a bunch of stuff before doing anything. Also, I don't mind minor imbalances, and recognize that they are inevitable in this type of game (I don't mind any of the imbalances in Twilight Imperium, for instance). But there looks to be far to much variance in the abilities.

I can only remeber feeling like this after a new game once among the the games I've played (somewhere around 150 different ones). It's not that I don't like the game; I've played lots of games I don't like, but usually just laugh good naturdly and say "well, to each his own. I don't care for it, but I see why some people might". And I actually would like to like this game. I'm certainly interested in giving it another try.

However, it just doesn't feel well put together for some reason. As I said in the title, it feels rather a mess.

Does anyone else get this feeling, or is it just me?

UGGGH, this is absolutely the worst forum software ever. I now know what Duke has been fuming about. You can't multi-quote at all. I will respond to this later without quotes. I'm about ready to break something.

About the Macron Flare
That doesn't mean when YOU play a card. It means after the encounter cards of the main players are revealed. So if you are allied, you have to wait until the cards are played to use this. It would be pointless to play before. You're supposed to wait until the encounter totals are being figured. This is just a misprint. Another player mentioned this in a thread specifically about this card recently. Fortunately, there aren't many errors like this -- fortunately, and surprisingly. I've played seven games so far with but one rule question about flares (about to post).

About the Observer
I played the power for the first time tonight, but I sadly did not get the flare. I'll look into it tomorrow if no one else figures it out.

About Encounter Cards
It's good to be able to see at a glance where your encounter cards are in your hand because some newcomers get confused and play reinforcements or other cards as encounter cards if they don't know better. I even saw someone play a flare once, though I should add that my group is not really made up of dedicated gamers.

About Balance
Well, Cosmic isn't a balanced game. You're right on that part. But the players can balance it out, which is what makes it so fun. The social aspect can easily outweigh any alien power issues. As for Vacuum particularly, no offense, but as a first time player you really should get more familiar with the game before judging the aliens. A lot of players grossly over value aliens of simple strategy like Clone and Virus (though in multiple power games I wouldn't scoff at either) and equally undervalue aliens like Vacuum or Hacker because their powers technically rely on losing. I'm eager to try out Hacker still, but I've played many, many games with Vacuum in the past, and he's easily one of my favorites. If you win the encounter, hooray! If you lose, you still get to have some fun and cause trouble. You can also put people into the position of feeling threatned so that they might even prefer to lose to you. Not only this, but later in the game once a player is low on ships, you can cause him to lose power or even colonies... you just don't get more powerful than that. All the while, you should be careful to be getting ships from warp whenever you ally defense to maintain advantage, though this isn't necessary because you have to remember other players are losing ships from normal game events, not just your power. Anyway, in summary and conclusion, I really like Vacuum.

But even if you still aren't convinced Vacuum rocks, the point is that each alien has his own special advantage, and some will see it while others won't. There's no ultimate alien, though Loser is probably the popular choice. I hope you give it some more time to grow on you. It's hard to judge a game with 50 aliens after one or a few games because there is still so much that can happen, and it's hard to know whom to feel threatened by in which situations.

About the Macron Flare: I realize what it is suppposed to mean. But the fact remains that that isn't what it says . So my complaint is really just bad wording that should have been caught in the editing/playtesting.

I'm probably just being to nitpicky, but it seemed like we were having to double check the wording of lots of cards. I believe that there was also an artifact or two that seemed to have inconsistencies on the card.

So apparently your answer was No, you didn't get that feeling at all. In which case, I'm glad. As I said, I'd like to pull it out again. I think part of the problem was we were playing one of the special abilities wrong, and it made for rather a messy game (but in this case, it was totally our own fault we were playing it wrong, so I'm not blaming FFG for that ).

So while it did feel like rather a mess, I think that this game has potential and will see how it goes with a second and third try.

I realized what you meant about Macron's flare after I posted. Whoops.

And yea, we've played a few "messy" games before, but usually due to our own mistakes. Two games we played with the classic Wild Filch Flare that allows you to steal cards and ships if you aren't caught in the act, but I didn't realize it said "discard" not "discard or deck," so I stole the whole deck and pissed everyone off, haha.

We also played a game where, who knows how, tons of flares got shuffled in the deck, way more than should have been. That was a disaster given that the player who had most of them was a new player and had to read all of those cards!

And I'm sure I've played at least one alien wrong before in the original game, though so far the aliens we've used in the new set have seemed pretty clear.

So I guess it's a mess sometimes (just wait until you try a game with multiple powers per player!), but usually that is either through player error or it's a good mess. Chaos can be fun! As for some poor wording or misprints, not much to do about that, but let home rules reign if you think something is wrong. As for your worries about balance, I still say stick with it. You'll find uses for aliens that never occurred to you before even after playing a hundred games with them due to the highly variable environment with different aliens and flares in every game.

And if you ever want a less messy version, try the online game. It handles the rules for you!

No, it *is* a mess. That's a feature, not a bug.

The game was created over *thirty* years ago, released as a base set with *nine* expansion sets by a company that was considered small even then. Back then, "balance" was not as important as "fun". And Cosmic's attraction was the chaos of how the powers, flares, and other goodies interacted. But, with any legacy, fans conflicted over old time favorite aspects of the game (particularly powers) versus new age modern ideas (such as "improving" the game in whatever way the current designer saw fit).

I'm sure that had Cosmic Encounter been designed today, it would be more streamlined and balanced. In fact, a gentleman named Richard Garfield did just that. But I'll stick to Cosmic Encounter, thanks. When's the expansion with *my* favorite powers coming back?

Joram said:

There are not five types of cards. There are only three. Attack, negotiate & morph cards are all encounter cards. If they labeled negotiation cards as anything other than encounter cards, it would make players think that they could get new hands when they began turns with only negotiation cards in their hand.

Also, there is only one morph card in the game, so it would hardly make sense to give it its own type.

Joram said:

There is one set of timing rules. It applies to reinforcements, but timing is less relevant for reinforcements - since playing a reinforcement card often spawns another player to play another reinforcement. You end up re-starting the timing rules every time a new player starts jumping in. First one side is ahead, then players from the other side play reinforcements until they are ahead - then the first side responds, etc.

murph said:

murph said:

It is its own type, though -- see post above. This is an important distinction, most obviously for the plague.

First, I have to agree with this forum software. It blows. I click reply thinking it will show me the original post in the space below. Nope! VBScript Runtime error on the server side. Guess I have to open a new window.

I 100% agree with you about the Macron flare. It caused us much grief in my first game. Doesn't anyone read this stuff before printing it?

I don't like how they added the "start turn" phase on all the cards. Yes, some of the current aliens have a power that triggers then, but for f--k's sake, how hard is it to just print "do this at the start of your turn" instead of printing the pointless START TURN phase on every single card . So far it has confused two different groups of players when trying to figure out what you get to do during your second "encounter".

I also got a good laugh about how the reinforcement cards are barely even mentioned in the rulebook. You would think there would be a section devoted to them where the rules describe the reveal phase. Nope! They are just barely mentioned at the very end of the rules. If you didn't know they existed ahead of time, you might not even know until you are into your first game.

The fact that they labeled the cards with a "type" at the very top of each cart (artifact, encounter, flare) then proceed to totally redefine "type" for other specific cards (plague) is hilarious and aggravating at the same time.

The rulebook in general is rather haphazard, which is a shame since this is obviously supposed to be geared toward new players. The Mayfair rulebook was rock solid.

I have to disagree with you about the alien powers. Play a dozen times then get back to us. Yes, some aliens are clearly more powerful with on the attack. Some are powerful in other ways. Each alien has a fair way to win.

*EDIT* Whoever wrote this forum software apparently has never actually tried to use it. It overrides your right click menu. My browser spell-checks, but I can't right click to correct since the forum software overrides it with a completely useless "cut/paste" option. Hello, I can cut and paste with the keyboard. Speaking of keyboard, it also overrides certain common keyboard shortcuts. Thanks a lot for overriding my keyboard combination that opens a new tab. I didn't really want to do that anyway, right?

dcorban said:

To be fair, all you need to know is printed on the cards themselves, and they are mentioned on page 4 with a pointer to page 13 for the complete description.

Here is my biggest problem with reinforce cards: The rules don't say which comes first, reinforce cards or flares and abilities that come in the reveal phase. Suppose that the Humans are winning an encounter, but have an ally who will zap their power if they start losing. Are they supposed to wait until everyone has had a chance to play reinforce cards before saying they are using the ability and letting it be zapped, or do they do that before, or is it just whoever shouts first that plays their card/power, or what?

There are countless other abilities that people might want to use if reinforce cards are played, but don't want to if they aren't. And it is just a mess.

So which comes first? Reinforcements or powers? Or is it just a big chaotic mess?

My group will be sitting down and setting up our own system since this isn't covered in the rules.

And in spite of the mess, I'm going to play it again!

On the subject of the five different card types, there certainly are 5 types. The rules say so on page 13 under "Card Types".

But you are right that Negotiate, Attack, and Morph are all "Encounter" cards for the purposes of discarding your cards. Which is another messy part.

Well, coming from games like Magic with defined timing systems, I feel your pain, and despite my rules-lawyering nature, I think the game is meant to be a little wacky.

Say the offense (with Human and a zap) is winning. If the defense does nothing, the offense wins and saves a zap. If the defense plays some reinforcements, they can play the zap after that. In this case I don't see any problem -- I'd say it's generally a good idea to hold off playing anything immediately after cards are flipped to see what anyone else might do. That's where some timing issues do come up though. It's one thing when someone plays something too quick (reinforcements followed by Human -- in that case so sad, too bad for the reinforcer) but it's another when two effects are trying to resolve simultaneously.

****, I miss the stack.

When cards are revealed, it is a free-for-all, no holds barred. Throw down anything you want at any time. First card to hit the table is the first to go into effect! If we had systems for every little phase of the game, one turn could last a lifetime as for every little step you'd go around the table clockwise from attacker asking, "Do you want to play anything? No? How about you?" and so on. Chaos can be good!

I think there's less concern about an "order in which instant cards/effects are used", and more of a wish that a particular card's effect can't ever be trumped by something else just because they decided to play theirs first.

Well, tough.

Lots of situations in Cosmic Encounter are spaghetti western showdowns. Sometimes you flinch, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you'll end up playing something just to get a good card out of someone else's hand now rather than worry about when it'll be played later. If I think you've got a particular card, or you've made me think you've got a particular card, then congratulations, you've graduated to Level 4 of playing Cosmic. The levels, for those who aren't familiar, are:

Level 1: Playing the rules . You're learning how the encounter phases/timing work, and how alien powers affect the rules.

Level 2: Playing the powers . You take what you've learned from Level 1, and start to see the combinations and interactivity between certain powers when they're in the same game.

Level 3: Playing the hands . You take what you've learned from Level 2, and start to manage your hand for the game duration. You decide what encounters are good for trying to win, which ones must be lost, which ones are solely for the purpose of claiming compensation to drain an opponent's hand (playing an N), which ones you can gimmick your way to a victory, and when you have to "punt" (attack a planet you already have a colony on, in order to shed horrible cards). You also make smarter decisions on who to ally, and when allying is good for you (to get rewards, to get colonies, etc.)

Level 4: Playing the players. Once you've gotten an understanding of the first 3 levels, you can start to incorporate true poker dynamics into CE. By taking advantage of pre-conceived notions about 1) the rules, 2) how my power interacts with the rules and with your power, 3) how powers affect what I do with the cards in my hand and what you'll be doing with your hand, you can then mess with people's heads and bluff/intimidate your way to some very clever maneuvering.

dcorban said:

I always get a good laugh about how you are a professional whiner . And since there's no BGG police around to slap my hand, it feels good to just finally say that.

And, BTW ... the Reinforcement cards have a nice big "REVEAL" printed right on the cards themselves. Amazing! Who would think to actually look there ?

That's a good analysis, Zach. That is certainly how my play has evolved.

Good? It's mega-awesome-bitchin'!

In fact, I'm flat-out stealing it soon.

Big Head Zach said:

Well, you're wrong. (at least as far as I'm concerned)

I don't care about trumping things, I just wish that there wasn't a big pause every time the cards are revealed while everyone is hoping someone else is going to do something first, so you can see if it is even worth trying to stop it, or if it is better to save your cards for a later time, and no one wants to be the first to lay down,because they will likely waste it anyway, and so on.

I personally think it would be super fun if the order of abilities and such would screw around with everyone's plans; and if powers could react with each other in cool and unusual ways, and so on.

I just like a little more order to my games, that's all.

But oh well. I'll see how it goes next time.

Btw, I liked your analysis. I'll keep it in mind the next time I play.

Hi Joram,

I think your missing the idea of what makes CE so different and so enjoyable. I have been playing it for 30 years and many versions. It is precisely the unpredictable chaos that makes the game what it is, a true classic. From day one there have been rules conflicts, it is simply part of the equation... You work past them, learn from them and expolit them. One edition of the game ran the tagline "The games that breaks its own rules... (or close to that)."

Seriously, play some more. Learn the true dynamics as was posted earlier about the four phases (brilliant) and give it some more time. I hold my breath at the card reveal phase every turn, constantly scanning my hand of cards looking to the the right momment to play something great... only to then be totally twarthed by another player making a brilliant counter-play and sending chaos among the players...

-David

PS. I do feel your pain though, it can be frustrating... Some folks never really get into it. But it ahs lasted for over 30 years now, so its clearly not a mess. I remember playing a game in the early 90's. We got into a terrific rules quandry!! Voices were raised... Then on a lark, I picked up the phone and called Jack Kittridge in MA. I had his number since he has so kindly sold me some of the last original CE expansions he had left in his basement or garage. After about 20 minutes on the phone we had our answer and the game continued. The rules discussion went into the GIANT notebook we kept with clairifcation and house rules over various situations we had encountered.

While calling one of the game authors on the phone is not very viable, we do have this forum and the WARP to discuss all the millions of possible issues that come up in a good game of CE.