Close Encounters of the Cosmic Kind

Cosmic Encounter was first released in 1977 and has been republished several times since, each time by a different company. I have now played the three most recent versions of the game (Mayfair Games, 1991; Avalon Hill, 2000; and Fantasy Flight Games, 2008) and would like to reflect on my experiences of playing the various versions of the game.

When I first played Cosmic Encounter, I had no idea what it was about; it was just in a pile of games available for play. Inside the box were a reasonable number of cards and tokens, as well as several cardboard hexes that made up the game board. In the game each player controls 5 planets and up to 20 ships, players take turns sending their ships to try and establish colonies on the other players’ planets by attacking them, with the first player to have five colonies outside their own system the winner (as each player's system and ships are colour coded it often reminds me of Chinese Checkers). The system which is attacked is determined by turning over a card from the destiny deck and the attacking player then decides which planet in the system to attack and commits between one and four ships to the battle, each player then gets to appeal for help and their allies then also commit between one and four ships to the combat. Each of the two main players then place an encounter card face down in front of them, these normally have a number on them although they might say negotiate, then the cards are turned over and each side's battle score is equal to the number of ships on their side plus the value of the encounter card played with the loosing side's ships being destroyed and sent to the warp; if the card played says negotiate that side immediately loses but gets to claim compensation from the winner, if both players play a negotiate card then they have one minute to strike a deal or have three ships set to the warp each.

What really makes Cosmic Encounter fun is that in addition to having to make deals and alliances each player has an alien power, which enables then to break the rules in some way. Some of these powers are rather simple, such as each one of your ships counts as four instead of one, but you can only send one ship to a battle. While others are much more strange, such as you may complain about the cards in your hand, for example ‘I don’t have an encounter card with a value of over 30’, and another player must either give you what it is you are complaining about or else all players must discard any card they have that matches your complaint. Initially I was concerned that the powers were not balanced but I needn’t have worried as any player whose power is ‘too good’ will simply find it hard to get allies in battle and the game will once again be balanced.

The first version of the game I played was the Mayfair games edition and I thoroughly enjoyed it, there were a large number of alien powers and they made for an interesting and amusing game. When I saw that a new version had been made by Avalon Hill I immediately went out, bought a copy, and was thoroughly disappointed. The Avalon Hill version was more visually striking than the old game, but they had greatly reduced the number of alien powers and the ones that were included were all simple. So after spending several years warning people not to buy this once great game I got to play the newest edition by Fantasy Flight Games. I was immediately hopeful as there were a large number of alien power cards in the box and yes the weird and wonderful ones were back. I was thrilled; the game was restored to what I liked best about it and had been visually updated to a high standard.

One final thing about this 'game that breaks its own rules' is that it relies heavily on players being honest, as quite a number of the powers and cards in the game involve players having to discard certain types of cards from their hand with no immediate way for other players to see if this was done correctly. I've never experienced anyone cheating, but I just find it amusing that a game about 'rule breaking' relies so heavily on player honesty.