Okay, confession time: if I have a favorite game, it’s probably Cosmic Encounter. At least I’m in good company: Steve Jackson cited Cosmic Encounter as one of the games that influenced his classic Illuminati! Richard Garfield said the same of Cosmic Encounter with regard to the creation of Magic: the Gathering. The game has jumped from company to company – five in English alone – and was enshrined in the Gaming Hall of Fame in 1997. Not bad for a game that was first published out of the designers’ homes after it was narrowly rejected by Parker Brothers.

Fantasy Flight's 2009 Cosmic Encounter

At its heart, Cosmic Encounter weds negotiation with aggressive expansion. Each player manages an alien species attempting to gain dominance in the cosmos by colonizing five planets outside of their home system. Resolution is simple, as each player adds a numeric card from hand to the ships on their side of the conflict. Players can ask for assistance from other players in attacking or defending planets, adding additional ships to the balance in exchange for some sort of reward, or participants can play diplomatic cards instead of attack cards, angling for a compromise instead of destructive aggression. Other cards, called “artifacts,” have one-shot abilities with varying effects, such as retrieving damaged ships or blocking potential allies out of an encounter, while “flare” cards give similarly one-shot boosts to alien powers.

What makes Cosmic Encounter more than just an area-control game with a space theme is the alien power mechanic; each player’s alien race has a special power that lets it bend, break, or alter one of the fundamental rules of the game. It’s practically taken for granted these days, but in 1977, the idea of a game whose rules were not fixed and unchanging, but could rather be manipulated or even broken by the players, was a radical notion, but this was what made Cosmic so influential to other game designers. Nearly any rule is subject to some alien’s power: the Mind can look at another player’s hand, for example, while Anti-Matter reverses the rules of combat so the lower total wins rather than the higher. Over the various incarnations of the game, over 75 official aliens have appeared in one form or another, with fan creations numbering in the hundreds. As a result, the number of possible game permutations is mind-boggling, and Cosmic Encounter promises a truly different game every single time.

The 2000 Hasbro/AH Cosmic Encounter - lovely, but unsatisfying

One benefit of its long lifespan has been that Cosmic Encounter has received some tremendous attention to its physical design. The game started off with entirely cardboard tokens and hexes along with paper cards, but later versions have received utterly jaw-dropping makeovers. The Hasbro/Avalon Hill version is such an example, with its peculiar stacking towers of spaceships and trippy full-color alien design; while the first real leap forward in physical component quality, this version was a stripped-down game with only 20 aliens and some of the auxiliary mechanics removed entirely – good perhaps for introducing new players, and apparently slated for expansions, but those never materialized and the license warped to Fantasy Flight Games. While copies of the original Eon Games edition or the breakthrough Mayfair Games iterations still turn up occasionally on auction sites, most rate Fantasy Flight Games’ edition (the current one) as faithful to the game’s essential elements. The just-released first expansion for this set, Cosmic Incursion, ups the FFG alien roster from 50 to 60, adds parts for a six-player game, and introduces some additional new mechanics.

If you’re still unsure about whether Cosmic is for you, the best way to decide is to try the game for free: Cosmic Encounter Online (http://www.cosmicencounter.com) is run by one of the original designers, Peter Olotka, and features 20 aliens and head-to-head play.