Gaming over the holiday

Over the Easter weekend, Doris and Ryan stayed with us, and that as always means we have an opportunity to play some board games... I had a couple of new ones that I wanted to try out.

On the first evening of gaming, I convinced everyone to go for this one:
Cosmic Encounter is a game that has been around since the late 70s in various incarnations. In fact, I already owned the mayfair 1991 edition that is currently in my sister's laundry room. The fine folks at Fantasy Flight republished a new version again last year and I bought it based on my love of the past versions as well as a love of Fantasy Flight games in general.

I think that the ladies especially were not super enthusiastic with the science fiction theme of the game and I had to do a little convincing, but they agreed to play at least once to try it.

Here is the game in a nutshell:

Every player is an alien race living on five planets. The goal of the game is to create colonies on five planets other than your home ones. You do this by playing cards. Each alien has a special, unique power that lets them do something interesting. There are 50 alien races in the game. It is also important that if more than one player meets the winning conditions, then they win too. This allows for some good alliances.

in our game the aliens were:
The Observer (Ryan): Who can keep their ships from dying when helping others.
The Pacifist (Doris): Who wins a conflict when they choose negotiation.
The Parasite (Claudia): Who can force themselves on other players as an ally (wanted or not)
The Mutant (Fraser): Who can steal cards from others in certain situations.

Explaining the game seemed to take a long time, but once we got started, it went very quickly and quite smooth. I don't think we made too many glaring errors in rules or strategy really. The slowest aspect of the game was reading and understanding the "special" flare and artifact cards which often seemed a little cryptic.

Here is Pacifist Doris reading up on something while Parasite Claudia giggles to herself.
I got off to quite a poor start, and all the others stacked up on offense and beat their way into my home planetary system.
I think the game was quite fast moving once we all got the hang of how actions should occur. The whole game took us about 90 min to play, including a significant chunk of time at the beginning where I read out the rules and explained.

I think next time we play, this one would be 45-60 minutes with four people.

Here is the Observer Ryan Observing while Claudia prepares to play a card.
I thought that my alien power was pretty cool at the start of the game when I first read it, but it turned out to be totally irrelevant. My hand almost never dropped below 8 cards to allow it to be used. As for the others, Doris made very good use of her Pacifism winning quite a few battles with the negotiate cards, something that usually means you lose the fight.
Ryan was not that excited about his power at the start when choosing his alien and almost threw it back for a new one, but it turned out to be one that he used the most. I think the Observer power was used more than any other in the game and allowed Ryan to get involved in lots of space fighting action.

Claudia's power of forcing herself as an ally seemed a little weak at the start, but as she got more points and the endgame approached, it turned out to be one that made her really hard to handle.

Despite all the fine moved by everyone, a situation opened in the end that would allow me to win by scoring 2 points in a single turn. I could only do it if very specific events happened and another player agreed to help me. At first I thought only Doris could help and I offered the alliance to her, so we would both score 5 colonies and we would win together, but Doris did not trust me and thought I had a sneaky trick in store.
The discussion made me see a way that I could execute my plan with Claudia as an ally as well, and she agreed right away to join up. I felt silly for not seeing it earlier. I did not want to disclose my details, but I even offered to Doris to join in, having all three of us win, and only poor Ryan lose. Her trust was not there though and the Pacifists sat off alone in their corner of the cosmos.

Of course, the plan worked perfectly and Claudia and I reached the five colony goal together, sealing the victory and ensuring that the universe would now be under the rule of a joint Mutant-Parasite empire. I am sure the Pacifists felt silly.

In the end, game night #1 was a fun filled success. I would absolutely play this game again right away.