Cosmic Encounter has been acknowledged among game designers for its ground breaking design. We called it a simultaneous-revelation-social-interaction-game. What’s intriguing, is that unlike the vast army of boardgames in existence, Cosmic Encounter has not been the victim of copycat products. At the time of this printing, Cosmic has entered its fourth decade at 38 years old and counting, with a new 2008 version from Fantasy Flight Games and an Expansion set, Cosmic Incursion from FFG hitting the shelves in 2010.
A 2009 Boardgame Geek review from Nate Owens, a first time player, sums up the game’s appeal as well as anything written in the previous four decades “…This is no museum piece. Even if it’s a 32-year-old design, Cosmic Encounter feels as thrilling and cutting edge as anything I’ve ever played.”
Disclosure: Nate is not a relative and I have never met him. Anyway, the $$ I sent him was a small sum, relatively speaking.
Creative people are always being asked: “How did you come up with the idea?” So let’s talk about inspiration. As with lots of new designs (in any field), it’s nice to have no clue about what you are doing. Preconception of what a game is can often be a debilitating factor among many designers. “Hey let’s get some monsters and give them some stuff, and then they can go beat up some other monsters. And my innovation is to make a sword that is worth a gazillion flimbats. Oh and, the graphics will be really cool.”
Yawn.
New Alien: The Snob - power to yawn
It would be able to swat away intruders with the back of its hand - as long as its card was the lowest.
Anyway, when I am asked, it makes me think of the five second elevator pitch: Risk meets the Godfather Game in 1971. My partners-to-be and I used to play epic games of Risk. Over time, the incessant clatter of dice (see my Risk essay in James Lowder’s Family Games Best 100) cultivated a desire to have a diceless game. Just about then, I saw a picture of the 1971 Godfather Game ensconced in a violin case. I never played it, but was taken with the idea that it was marketed, literally, outside the box. I was formally bitten by the game design bug, and have suffered from it lo these many years.
In retrospect here are some of the influences on Cosmic’s design:
Chess was weighed in strategically because the pieces had their own unique movement.
Poker had a hand because it was the ultimate bluffing game.
Star Trek of the sixties scripted Cosmic’s flavor with its self-deprecating stars lurching around the set.
Science fiction authors Asimov, Herbert, Niven and Pohl suspended our disbelief, and we never recovered it.
As long as we are discussing the game, here is a brief retrospective of the team’s cosmic journey. The Cosmic Encounter design journey started in 1971 with Bill Eberle and myself, and expanded to four by the time Eon Products, Inc. was founded. We called ourselves Future Pastimes as a design team. One of the keys to Cosmic’s design was the collaboration and clash sparked by the personalities and skill sets of the designers. We did everything by unanimous agreement. Think about that for a minute. Were we mad? Most definitely. But we produced a cascading rush of rule breaking. “If you can do that than I can do this.”
“Oh yeah? Then I will....”
I brought the idea of doing a game that was different and science fiction based. Bill Eberle contributed seeing everything from unexpected perspectives. Jack Kittredge carried the torch for logic and rationalism and precision. Bill Norton tossed in offbeat humor and whimsy and then on a whim, sold out for cash. Three way split.
If you are new to design you might want to experiment with thinking in the abstract about how to theme your game.
Theme is more than window dressing, and less than fanatical immersion. To be true to theme, a design should strive to capture the essence of the setting or construct by creating a system in which players naturally adopt behaviors that fit their circumstances. Success is when a player is surprised to act in a way that is not in keeping with their real life personality, as though it were normal.
In our case, we wanted a science fiction game because we couldn’t find any in 1971. Science Fiction has no restrictions. We were free! The Moody Blues played “Days of Future Passed.” So we were Future Pastimes. Note: Alert gamer Greg Costikyan has cited the Lensman boardgame made in 1969 by Philip N. Pritchard. Glad we missed it lest we had fallen in love with it.
Since we are starting from the abstract and moving to the specific, let’s play the name game. Game names are tough to come by. Our first take was The Universe Game. We went through a collection of “not quite” names before settling on Cosmic Encounter. I think it still needs work. It evokes longhaired hippies sitting under crystal pyramids. Of course the designers were longhaired hippies, who hated rules. So there you go.
And now that we have named it, we have to explain/sell it with a tagline which is very useful for games which have bad names.
Cosmic Encounter has had in no particular order:
The science fiction game for everyone
A quantum leap in games
The game that breaks it own rules
Always Different, Always Fun
A Game of Infinite Possibilities
There are probably even more taglines in the non-English version.
Crafting underlying principles is an important place for the designer to start. I mean, really start here. Draw up a list of principles to follow and /or elements for your game to have. Then design with them in mind. Here were ours:
No dice allowed
Everyone had to be different
Play would offer compromise and conflict
No one would be eliminated
Players could win together
Each game would be different (re-playability)
License to cheat. Pretty much all players in all games would just love to be able to peek. Just a little. Woot!
Almost all the early Cosmic aliens were hatched from a player wishing “If only …”
I could see what she has (Mind)
I could get a do-over (Chronos)
I could get rid of this junk (Philanthropist)
I couldn’t die (Zombie)
I think it can be profoundly liberating to make a list of things you want your game to be and to not be, and then stick to them. Think about your likes and dislikes in the games you’ve played, and then try to settle on what you want your game to feel like.
A major subsection of crafting your game’s principles has to do with for whom you are designing. Who is your audience? If you were scoring attendance at a game convention; the score was Males 90 – Females 10. We all know why. Too many games were humorless exercises in mayhem. It’s still true today. The gorier and war-ier, the bloodier and fouler, the better. Footnote: If you were in the 90% and were just trying to score, the odds were against you.
When Cosmic Encounter was introduced at the cons, despite the 90 - 10 audience, the Cosmic players would be 50% female. We figured that the boys should notice. Good design is inclusive. Over the years Cosmic Encounter has been praised by many publications, from The Gifted Children’s Newsletter to The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games, which just shows the range. Social interaction is an inclusive characteristic for a game.
When you get to mocking up your game for the first time, a whole bunch of surprises spill out of the physical design. We call this “Cutting the Plant’s Vines.” In our very first tinker toy-cottage cheese container-erector set-egg carton Cosmic prototype, we had a Plant Alien with actual foam rubber vines. Each alien was festooned with egg carton cups serving as planets. If the plant vine could reach your planet it could get a base. The machine had some wire tendrils that were used in the event that it had to duplicate the plant’s power. We had a dodecahedron the size of a tennis ball with two each of six colors on its twelve sides. If you rolled your own color you had to roll again...and...again...and again...
These fussy and annoying mechanisms stopped the developmental progress of Cosmic for more than a year. But suffice it to say that when we fast talked our way into Parker Brothers and forced them to play our game, all they could do was roll their own color over and over.
Exit us, in round one of “What do we do now?”
Months later we unceremoniously cut the vines from the Plant and sent the dodecahedron to the archives. The result was a flood of new aliens and new ideas, which birthed the current incarnation of our game. The moral of the story is to let go early and often.
New Alien: The Preacher - power to moralize
It could offer to let you on to a planet of its choice anywhere in the game.
I like funny games. Games can create a social structure that operates under its own constitution. Most games labor under rules that are designed to be fair. Otherwise why bother playing? Right? Here’s the problem: Fair is not funny.
Let me put it this way: If you play a game for three hours and follow a complex set of perfectly balanced rules which feel fair to all, and you eliminate your four opponents one by one until you are the last one left, it’s not all that funny. And it’s particularly not all that fun for the losers. Many players and some publishers have railed that things which happen in Cosmic are “not fair.” In Cosmic Encounter, we give you that rail and allow you to stick it up your opponent’s.... Especially if said opponent is whining that his alien has no such rail with which to stick you. This whole process led to the design of the Sniveler, who has the power to whine. Now that’s funny.
A component of “Not Fair” is “The Gloat.”
When a player makes a stunning upset from a hopeless position, or totally dominates, or sets up an air-tight strategy, or finds a new wrinkle in an alien power, it introduces the gloat factor. We would often measure new features which we added to Cosmic by their gloat factor. The more gloat, the merrier (or the infuriating), depending on whose gloat is being factored.
Game development often gets short shrift, but it is the guts of design. Playtest. A lot. Don’t be afraid to get rid of things that don’t work. Don’t grow attached to anything in the game. Be ruthless. And, painful as it always is, we really do need others to weigh in. Listen to the ones who make a good case for their proposed changes. And never reject any criticism out of hand. If you do reject it out of hand, sleep on it. The flip side of accepting the critics’ complaints is to design what you like despite the skeptics. Ultimately I suppose it’s a blend.
Since Cosmic Encounter, despite its longevity, has never had blockbuster sales, here are four cosmic measuring sticks which you can adopt for your low selling but brilliant game.
Losing Can Be Fun
When you hear that the players who lost start out by saying, “I lost but I didn’t care because it was so much fun,” it’s a reminder that in multiplayer games most people lose. So if you can make losing fun......
I Lost My Game In The Divorce
Here we have the ultimate designer compliment. I mean, you know, the house, the car, the dog, the Cosmic Encounter set! Footnote: The records of any divorces due to a momentous spouse-to-spouse Cosmic Gloat have been sealed for the protection of the Cosmic designers.
Surprising The Designers
If, after you are well past the design phase, and you’ve been playing for a while, you are still surprised by what happens in your very own game, I’d say you have a winner. It means that your design creates situations that are not planned, but rather are generated by the unique circumstances of any given game. While I was writing this I surprised myself by thinking of two new aliens and decided to leave them in here. Just for fun.
The Retelling
This is a measure of a game’s appeal. If it gets a lot of this then it’s a success. (See “Not Fair” and “The Gloat”.)
Final thoughts.
We in the biz like to think of ourselves as professionals. And I suppose we are. But if you are reading this book there is a good chance that you might not quite have professional status just yet. I say good! Focus on creating games that are unique. It’s very crowded out there in copycat gamer land. Work hard at defining your own space. For most game designers, once bitten by the design bug, there is no choice about your career. You just have to do it, so you might as well do it well.