Just curious if there has been any news.

The reason I ask is that my copy of Cosmic Encounter was packed at Fantasy Flight's factory by a voodoo witch doctor shaman who put a hex on my copy. Every time I pull the game out, a 6th player appears out of nowhere, and we have to put it away and play something that will take 6 players.

So, I want my expansion!!!!

You know the Expansion has the same curse put on it, but it will be with a 7th player...

In a pinch, you could grab 5 coasters, 20 quarters, and have an "emergency" 6th player. Use the "special" destiny cards as that system's color.

RobertDG said:

I've done this several times. One time we even had Miser in, and the deck still had plenty enough cards, so there really is no downside at all unless you really, really like special destinies -- that is, you like them more than your 6th player.

Be sure to note that there will be 2 more flares than normal because of the extra player if you play with flares (and who doesn't?).

I hope it's sooner rather than later.... I'd love to see 2 expansions come out in the next year.

Adam said:

Two more flares than normal? I don't understand. Perhaps I have been playing wrong this whole time -- aren't all the flares supposed to go into the deck, or is it just those of the aliens in the game?

Huh. So I guess I have been playing wrong -- we've always used all the flares. How strange.

We accidentally played with all the flares once. I just saw a bunch of cards on the table and figured someone quit in the middle of shuffling. Whoops! That is a mess to play, especially when (in our case) a new player gets the Wild Filch flare and steals nearly every flare in the game and proceeds to try to read through them all between turns... oy vey.

You're supposed to have 10 flares in each game for 5 players are fewer, but with 6 you'll deal each player 2, adding up to 12, though the rules of course don't cover 6-player games.

Huh. I guess we'll try that way, but we've been playing since the FFG version has been out with all the flares now (not Filch classic, though) and it will seem really strange to cut down to one-fifth of those. I guess it will make more sense with less having to ditch your hand and some flares will be much more useful, even those which are not very good at all -- since there's far less competition in terms of what you play as your one flare per turn.

Playing with all of them is overkill. It's way too much reading. In a normal game, you won't usually have more than two flares at a time at most, on average, so it's easy to memorize what they do quickly. But if you end up with 5 or more in a hand due to not following the rules, you run the risk of someone constantly slowing down the game to say, "Wait, let me read what this does, I forgot," which makes for a boring game. Not to mention it increases the odds of having a bad hand with almost no attack cards. The FFG deck seems to be very carefully weighted with the normal rules.

If you want to play with all the flares, I'd recommend trying some sort of house rules such as The Warp's rewards deck where you have a separate deck to the side that can be drawn from at different times than the main deck, that way the ridiculous amount of flares doesn't mess with the encounter deck's well-balanced consistency. I don't know off-hand how this rewards deck works, but maybe you could play whenever you can take four rewards as a defensive ally, you can take one from the flare deck instead. Or maybe you could do it like Tech (alongside or in place of) where you research an extra flare with ships up to a default number for all flares (say, 8, maybe).

Just some thoughts, if you are dead set on keeping all flares in. You should at least try the normal rules. I think you will find that, even though it is perhaps less chaotic, it adds another variable to the game: which flares will be in play this time? We usually don't show each other the flares we're dealt, either, so some of them end up being surprises when they come up, which is fun.

But if you like shuffling 40 extra cards into the game every time, to each his own! That's Cosmic!

webslinger9 said:

Wouldn't that be a "7th Guest"?

Well, to be fair, the flares are always in the deck when we play our way. It's much easier then to just deal out two alien sheets and pick from those. We will probably try the actual way soon though. It does seem to make a lot of things make more sense, but I think it has gotten to the point among the most frequent players where we know all the flares well enough.

Back on topic though, we are eagerly awaiting any and all expansions, perhaps due to laziness more than anything. It's not like there isn't already a ton of content available online, but the difficulties of incorporating it into our set will probably keep up from doing so for at least a little while longer.

It's a lot easier to shuffle the flare deck than the alien sheets, though. How do you shuffle your aliens? We've only had to do so once for Reincarnator, and it was a pain because I didn't want to damage them. Usually I leave them in alphabetical order so after you are dealt your flares it is very quick to pick out your alien, though obviously a bit indirect compared to dealing out the aliens themselves.

For reincarnator, we've worked out a couple alternate systems to avoid shuffling the alien cards. Choose the one you like best (the alien cards are alphabetical in each case):

1. Cut the deck of alien cards a bunch of times, then draw the top card. Repeat the series of cuts every time you need to draw a new power. The cuts will preserve the alphabetized state of the deck, modulo the one cut needed to bring Amoeba back to the front. Alternately, *don't* bring Amoeba back to the front -- keeping the alien cards alphabetized but cut to a random element makes it harder for people to spot alien races that have already been picked out during the alien selection phase at game start.

2. Generate a random number from 0 to (size of deck - 1). Count that many cards down and take the next card. This is handy if you've got a computer nearby, or maybe a couple 10-sided dice (just roll percentile and reroll if it's too high). Doesn't mess up the deck order at all, but requires a bit of counting through the pile.

When using the Reincarnator we just shuffle the rest of the flares and lets the guy who plays the reincarnator have that deck beside him.

Then he just gets to draw the flares and then he takes the alien wich matches the flare.

The downside here wich we just discovered is that there are five flares in game wich he cannot pick, and he might wanna have the opportunity to pick these aliens since you could have their flares in your hand. (The same thing works for the Reincarnator wild flare).

So you could just add 5 cards from another game and write the names of the remaning alien on those, but then thats probably more troublesome than just shuffling the alien sheets from the begining

Since there are exactly 50 aliens (and a rumored 50 more to be included in Cosmic Incursion ), you could list all the aliens on a d100 chart, and roll that for power selection once the game is underway. As people acquire, develop, and use homebrews, this seems to be the best solution.

thats not bad either

and with 50 aliens every alien just get two numbers on a d100

Big Head Zach said:

SkyFalling said:

At first I thought rolling the die was best, but then I thought about method the cutting the deck method... and that's really the easiest. When you think about it, all that has to happen is one person needs to put the aliens under the table and cut it just once, with an emphasis on not doing necessarily in the middle, but possibly in the middle. Then, let the Reincarnator choose from fanned cards or cut it one more time and choose what's on top. The reason you only need to do it once for each pick is that it completly disorientates the Reincarnator's alphabet sense... they can't have a clue where anything is until they draw one.

Big Head Zach said:

Hooray!!!!!!

I wouldn't get overly attached to that "50 new aliens in Cosmic Incursion" thing.

As far as I can tell, that is a rumor that started with someone posting a "wouldn't it be cool" thread that was then quoted as an actual fact. Let's wait until FFG actually announces something.

Otherwise when FFG does announce something people won't get all upset that the plans were "changed" when in fact we were just operating off wishful thinking.

In any case, I'm looking forward to what's coming, in all it's high-quality-component glory.

Our games always have 5 flares per player. It's how we played EON, and it's carried forward into FFG's version:

We deal 3 flares to each player, they find those powers, keep one, discard one, put one in the middle (which is randomly distributed back to the players). The 3 flares are collected, and 2 extra flares per player are added to the deck.

-shnar

Bump! Any word on this?

You can only pray every day to the Elder Ones (forgot their names, some kind of Xel Naga like) that FFG reveals this expansion as one of the remaining two boxes on the home page (I'll admit, I'll pray with you)

Hadn't seen that! Do you think this game is selling well enough for an expansion? Boy I hope so! Maybe I'll buy another one as a gift!