Tonight, I went to Jason’s game night for the first time in a while. We played two games: Cosmic Encounter, and Viva Java.
Cosmic Encounter should need no introduction to most of the people reading this; it’s a classic game of light-hearted space treachery for nerds. In my opinion, any game of CE where people have to start analyzing the rules to figure out exactly what should happen is a win for everyone involved, and this game went well:
I was the Masochists, whose special power is that they can win by losing every single one of their tokens. I’d quietly put my last few tokens into allying to defending against an attack that would have won the game for the attackers; when the defenders win – which they did – defensive alles go back to any base their players own. But if you have no bases on anyone’s planets (yours or the other players), your tokens go into the same place all the other dead tokens go. Which meant I won when the next turn began. After the other players looked at the rules, and decided that yes, this sure sounded like what was supposed to happen, nicely played you magificent bastard you.
Except I didn’t win, because another player tossed a Cosmic Zap card, which nullified that use of my power. So they had one turn to cobble together some other kind of victory. Everyone else was one base away from winning the game, and there were frantic attempts to try to pull together a 4-way or 2-way victory when the Destiny Deck dictated that I was not the person who would be attacked that turn. I don’t recall who actually got the official win – I think it was a 4-way – but damn, I pulled off a sweet move that triggered a moment of Rules Lawyering; in my book I pretty much won.
And then we tried a game our host had gotten off of Kickstarter a while back. It was this thing called Viva Java that really wanted to have about seven players. Which, at this point, we had – a seventh had come in halfway through Cosmic Encounter and spectated.
This game mostly taught me one thing: if I’m ever doing the graphic design for a board/card game, test it in low light conditions. Because this game utterly failed to work in the moderate light of Jason’s living room. Like a lot of West Coast houses, there’s no overhead light. And this game? Well, this game has lots of brown in it, because of the coffee theme. We had to try and distinguish between brown bean tokens and red-brown bean tokens. We had to try and distinguish between black, red-brown, blue, and green icons, all of which were… pretty much black, unless we shone a flashlight on them. We had to try and parse reference cards printed in white on pale tan backgrounds. It was really gorgeously themed, with some really pretty art on the cards, but wringing any sense out of the damn thing took an awful lot of work. If there’s anyone colorblind in the group, you can put it right back on the shelf – it’s hard enough for people with full color vision to tell things apart.
It didn’t help that it is very much a Euro game. It’s hard to recover from Incorrect Play in your first few moves, it’s very very analytical and dry. And it kinda depends on holding a lot of state about which colors of beans other players are holding in their bags of beans in your head, when you can barely tell what color they’re picking up sometimes. And, well, I’m the one who proposed Cosmic Encounter. I’m an Ameritrash player. Its mechanics did support its theme interestingly, but honestly I got to a point where we’d all run out of wisecracks to make about its design problems and got bored waiting for my turn to come up, and took out my phone and started playing Threes. I might have lasted longer if I’d been able to actually tell what the hell I was looking at at a glance instead of having to squint closely at everything.
The general consensus around the table was that it needed work, even from the people who are totally into hyper-analytical Eurogames. Even playing the simple introductory rules felt like there was a little too much going on; it might have been improved by adding some more things from the full version, but I suspect there would still be some superfluous mechanics. Dunno. I doubt I’ll ever end up playing it again, in part because it requires seven people to supposedly get good, in part because it’s just not my kind of game…