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(Note: Vitruvian Reviews are not a review in the traditional sense. Instead I pull apart and discuss one or more interesting mechanics in a game. All such reviews can be found on The Vitruvian Meeple).
There is no trading in Cosmic Encounter, so the bargaining and negotiation the game is known for boils down to a simple choice: do you aid the attacker, the defender, or abstain entirely from combat? Aiding the attacker provides the most immediate benefit. If the attacker wins you get to colonize the world along with them, and as the winner of the game is the first person to colonize five worlds it seems like a no brainer to help the attacker at every opportunity. The only thing you risk are a few ships - since only the principle combatants play attack cards you don’t have to agonize over playing your powerful cards to aid someone else.
Of course it is better to aid the defender if the attacker is in the lead and in danger of winning soon. If they already have four planets you can bet that every other player will rush to the defender’s aid - unless other players also have four planets and are willing to share a combined victory. The more positive advantage to aiding the defender is that in victory you can reclaim already lost ships, or draw more cards to replenish your hand of combat cards.
Because of this there is very little opportunity to obviously “screw over” another player in the game. The mechanics are so straight-forward that if negotiation is going to be meaningful it has to occur at the coalition-building level - i.e. rather than negotiating over each individual combat several players may form a pact to help one another. But even this is tricky because the advantage to adding ships to aid in attack or defense is rather minimal in the face of attack cards that vary widely in power. By intentionally reserving the powerful attack cards for combat that the principle combatants deem important players can subtly affect other players’ ship and planet count without appearing to intentionally throw a match. Thus a savvy player can create coalitions in which they are screwing over others without them even realizing it. This is only possible because the only hidden element in the game - a player’s combat cards - provide enough of a screen to one’s intentions to make backstabbing possible without anyone being aware it occurred.
Compare this to Settlers of Catan which lacks subtlety as coalitions quickly form to stop the player in the lead, or Democrazy where subtlety is possible but no coalition lasts long as victory conditions frequently change. In the former there is no shared victory condition so the player near to winning is blacklisted by everyone else at the table. In the latter there is enough hidden information that while I can form a strategy to screw over someone who aided me through most of the game, the rapid pace in which cards and votes change make this unlikely, and the backstabbing is far from subtle.
Cosmic Encounter works well when the person who wins knows that they managed to screw the other players over without them ever having been aware of it. This is possible because the simple mechanics make it obvious which player it is advantageous to aid in each conflict, but the principle combatants can intentionally throw the fight to hurt the very people that have agreed to help them. The downside, of course, is that it makes gloating in the end far less rewarding!
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