Saturday afternoon saw Charlene, Ben, Dan, Anthony, Marcin, and myself gather to play Cosmic Encounter.

I think it’s fair to say Cosmic Encounter is considered a classic board game.

We were playing the core game rules with the rewards decks added in.

Earlier in the day I had sorted all the alien cards by difficulty so that we would only be playing with the green (less complicated) ones. My thinking was for the majority of us this was our first game. We didn’t need to complicate that experience with potentially confusing, and complicated aliens.

Using the bgstat app to select the first player and not the draw of cards from the destiny deck, Ben was chosen as the first player.

I did enjoy my alien power as soon as other players started using artefact cards. It meant I got them, and could then use them myself. In other words the cards potentially came back to haunt them.

I’m not going to bore you with a long winded account of how Ben, Charlene, Dan, and myself all ended up on four points (aka colonies on other planets), and Marcin and Anthony trailed way behind.

But that was the situation after much negotiation, banter, and alliances as we ended up on what was to be the final encounter.

The final encounter of the game was for Dan. He had to choose who to attack. After much deliberation he chose Marcin.

Charlene, Ben, and myself were invited to join him on the attack. We threw in the maximum number of ships possible. This attack needed to succeed. I helped it along by playing an artefact that switched off Marcin’s alien ability of swapping played event cards. Oh and for some unexplainable reason Anthony threw in with Marcin.

But still Marcin was quietly confident of victory with a kicker card he was playing. However under normal circumstances he would have every right to feel that way. Indeed his play would have worked. But it didn’t take into account I had another artefact in hand that allowed my to cancel his kicker.

So smugly Marcin revealed his trump card that would remove everyone’s ships and deny us victory. Then my big reveal in response his reveal. His hopes and dreams shot down in burning flames.

He got smashed and his planet was colonised.

Sadly for Ben he was at the bar getting refreshments as the drama unfolded missing it all.

We had a four way win between Dan, Ben, Charlene, and myself.

What a blast the afternoon was. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Loved playing Cosmic Encounter.