Cosmic Encounter, the world’s greatest science-fiction board game, is now more than 40 years old, but it doesn’t look it. For a game that was conceived in 1972 and published in 1977, when tactical wargames and their Gygaxian spawn ruled geek culture, Cosmic Encounter feels like an ancient alien, a visitor from some advanced civilisation bearing gaming insights that wouldn’t become commonplace for 30 years.
It’s the execution, not some high concept, that makes Cosmic Encounter so great. “Alien races compete for territory by taking over each other’s planets” could have been the pitch for any 1970s wargame. Even as late as 1988 Avalon Hill was still making crusty sci-fi games like Merchant of Venus, with preset maps, dice-based subsystems and hundreds of unique tokens; in contrast, Cosmic Encounter is a triumph of abstraction and minimalism. Each player’s starting territory consists of an identical star system with five identical planets. The territories slot together in a modular way, gathered around the central repository for dead tokens: the warp. Each planet starts with four identical tokens, which represent your troops, and the cone (a pointer) that represents where your troops are headed in any given round.
Combat is basic. Each player has a hand of numbered cards and, when you fight, each side plays a card facedown. Flip them over: the player with the higher number, plus the number of tokens in combat, wins. (Here comes the diplomatic element: you can send foreign troops/tokens to assist your friends.) It’s a bluffing game, like poker: should you commit your best card to the battle, or will you end up wasting a 40 while your opponent throws the fight with a -5? Of course, if they’ve got allies when they play that -5, sending their trusting friends screaming to their deaths, grudges will be held. Win five fights, conquer five planets and you win.