Cosmic Odyssey Two Years Later

I take a look at the expansion, its contents, and reception two years after publication.

[@devondollahon9834]

Love this expansion!

[@TheJamon79]

This expansion was a huge boon for the game, so much fantastic content! I love the campaign format and now run regular 4-game campaigns with my game group. Each game we play with different selection methods, aliens, and variants. Having a finale winner take all, high stakes game is a blast. It has encouraged us to fully explore everything Cosmic has to offer. Thanks for helping to put this together Jack!

[@robertburns576]

My quick, unrefined thoughts on each aspect of this expansion: 1) Campaign Play: The alternate ways of selecting aliens are fun, the alternate methods of scoring are also fun, but as you mention, these could be applied to regular games of Cosmic Encounter. Stringing together games as part of a campaign with the Master and Wrench cards is okay but I've come to dislike having more than one variant in a game. Managing and leveraging the variables starts to take on too much importance relative to wheedling, cajoling and dealing. I feel like a simple tweak to not carry over the variant from Game 1 to Game 2, or from Game 2 to Game 3, would make it better. 2) Aliens: I've been a proponent of a "Cosmic Reda" expansion for a long time, but I'm surprised we didn't get some of your best homebrews in Cosmic Odyssey (particularly Grotesque, one of the pithiest homebrews I've ever seen). That said, by and large, I think we got some solid aliens, both the ones with old names (Assessor, Boomerang, Witch) and the ones with new names (Inferno, Extractor, Gremlin). The "Alternate Timeline" aliens are all improvements, although I'll go to my grave saying that Alt-Macron should allow for 2 ships in the Gate. 3) New Variant Components (new Techs, Hazards, Reward cards, Space Stations): Yes! I'm still enjoying these, although a few of the Ultra Rewards (especially Aperture) induce some consternation in my simple mind. 4) New Variants: I enjoy Array Objectives and Evolutions, particularly Evolutions, with the "ship crunch" that inevitably occurs. Ships should not be a cheap, easy-to-come-by resource. Moons, I'm still processing. I'd been hoping to see them for a while, but how they should tweak gameplay is the question that needs to be answered. Lux I enjoy a lot... although there seems to be some grumbling about it on Discord (which I barely look at it). It's all so great. I still want Reverse Systems, as well as an Alt-Timeline Horde, Coordinator, and Sloth... but that's just human nature. It's just gratitude all the way down! Thank you!

[@glowerworm]

Could you describe grotesque to me? I cannot find it anywhere online (and am struggling to naviaget Jack's warp page on mobile). On alternative timelines aliens, I still prefer the original Masochist since the new masochist is now unstoppable and simply acts as a better game timer power than Tik-tok. Old masochist usually didn't win the game but it was fun to play as and against, the new masochist is boring to our group and overpowered (and unfun for the masochist themself) to new players.

[@jasonc2784]

Aye! Thank you for the design!

[@ethanbrown6648]

Great video! I’ve got a question that I can’t find the answer to anywhere. My friends and I are working through this campaign now and wish there were more videos on the rules of this. One question that came up last game, how do you score if everyone lost the game? This happened due to a hazard. Does no one get the master card, and then ranking starts at 2nd? But then if you had 8 players, you would need a 9th rank. Personally, I feel like the rules for ranking aren’t explained very well, and the few discussions I have found online seem to interpret them differently than I thought. A video dedicated to just the ranking would be great! We are loving the game otherwise!

[@jackredathewarp]

@@ethanbrown6648 You still score the game. You get points per the age card.

[@ethanbrown6648]

@@jackredathewarp I guess my question was more surrounding the master card. Page 4 of the Campaign Guide states "Rank the players from highest to lowest score. The player or players that won the game write a "1" in their ranking box in the campaign log. Ignore the score of any winning players when assessing the ranking of the other players (who all wrote a "1" in the campaign log). Among the non-winning players, the highest-scoring writes a "2" in the campaign log, then, the next highest writes a "3", and so on." So, in our case where there was no winning player, I read this rule as no one writes a 1, and therefore no one gets the master card, and we start ranking at 2 and go from there based on the age card scoring. Is that how you would play it, or would you give the highest ranking player a rank of 1 and give them the master card, even though they didn't "win" the game. This was also with the Cosmic Teams age, which further complicated things since the partner of the person who ranked the highest also felt like they should have the same rank as them since they were a team, even though they didn't truly win the game, and as far as we could tell, teams that don't win the game do not get the same rank as their partner.

[@jackredathewarp]

@@ethanbrown6648 If there is no winner, then you just rank from there. Highest score gets the 1, and so on.