Cosmic Encounter

Here I am, still ill as a dog, with some viral throat/ear/chest infection, can't sleep, gargling with my own juices, and I stumble upon a rather fetching web based board game conversion called Cosmic Encounters.

COSMIC ENCOUNTER ONLINE


It's all about battling against and with 3 other aliens, to land a colony on their homeworlds. You send ships out to the encounter, and then you recruit allies, and then you throw encounter pods into the battle to boost the attack points, or negotiate booty from the encounter. It's all rather bewildering at first, and I'd recommend going through the quite well put together tutorials, before venturing into a real game. I stumbled into a game as a Guest and watched the fireworks and my mind explode. It is quite simple, but it has certain subtleties that are not obvious. The obvious subtlety is that the alien race you are randomly assigned (one of six in the free or guest game), each having a specific special power that usually defines their mode of play. Like each ship actually having the power of 4 ships for the offensive alien race. Or one where the oppositions encounter pod value is revealed to them before they select theirs, or, one where losing a battle can be turned on its head as a win. I've found, with the limited number of games I've played that even though theres a lot of rallying together with the aliens, this isn't a game of loyalty, its more a game of selective diplomacy. You win the game if you gain 4 new colonies on other worlds. If you kick an alien off three of his home worlds he loses his special ability. And there are artifact pods, that have special functions that can be played at crucial times to negate powers, release ships trapped in warp and to destroy opponents ships etc. All in all, the more you play it, the more woven the secret to winning seems to become.

As a free account, you only have a limited number of aliens available to you. If you're willing to cough up some money then you open up even more game specials and styles. It seems a perfectly interesting game with just the basic six though, at the moment. There didn't seem to be a lot of players online, around 20 when I logged on, but most of them were friendly and you can join a game with bots if you just want to test out your game without the competition of real people. It's a visual stylised feast of a game, works in Flash. Might be worth a look see for those slow lunchtime sessions, because the average game seemed to last about 20 minutes.