1/9/2024 0 Comments Cosmic encounter![]() Then, in what Bill Eberle describes as an executive board meeting on a beach, this list of rules transformed into the idea that defines Cosmic Encounter. ![]() It would be a game where more than one person could win. Over time, the list of rules for this unspecified game grew. As a rule' And we just started making up these kind of rules that were annoying us about playing Risk." ![]() We're not doing that, we're gonna have no dice in our game. "Everybody else who was playing was eliminated, and they're out in the kitchen making coffee and drinking wine. "We had played a lot of Risk at the time, and when you play Risk, the end of the game is two people sitting there rolling dice for about three hours," Olotka says. The pepperoni-like stuff at the bottom is the Virus, apparently. Another early prototype, where each alien race has a different design. But they soon became frustrated by the quality of the few games that were available. Along with a fourth friend, Bill Norton, who was working for the George McGovern Presidential Campaign, the group began meeting up regularly to play boardgames. He did hire another man, Jack Kittredge, and they became friends too. Olotka didn't hire Bill Eberle, but despite this the pair ended up becoming friends. Eberle had worked various jobs from being a teacher in Washington DC to a reporter in New Bedford. He met Bill Eberle when he came for a job interview. Having worked in the Peace Corps on the Pacific Marshall Islands, Peter Olotka returned to Cape Cod in Massachusetts with his wife Cindy and young son Greg, and took a job as a Community Organiser for the Cape's anti-poverty program. Indeed, the creators of the greatest boardgame in existence have never made a living off it.Ĭosmic Encounter first landed on shelves in 1977, but its story begins half a decade earlier. Despite the rapturous critical acclaim Cosmic Encounter has accrued in the 39 years since its first publication, it has not been followed by commercial success. The story of Cosmic Encounter is about a flash of creative genius in the early seventies, followed by four decades of struggle to see that vision fully realised. When I ask the creators about why they think Cosmic Encounter carries such a high-regard in boardgaming circles, their response is simply "We thought you were gonna tell us!" But behind the joke I detect a hint of frustration, and the longer we chat, the more this frustration comes to the fore.Īs it turns out, this is not surprising. In his review of the expansion, Cosmic Incursion, the Dice Tower's Tom Vassel referred to it as "probably the best game that's ever been made." Boardgame savant Robert Florence voted it his favourite boardgame of all time, while tabletop gaming website Shut Up And Sit Down placed it first and second in their two most recent lists of the greatest boardgames ever created. It's something you only notice later on, once you've got past the half-dozen or so other ways that Cosmic Encounter tears through boardgame convention like a death-slinging heat-ray.įirst published in 1977, Cosmic Encounter is a towering landmark in boardgaming history, regarded by many game critics as the finest example of the form. It should be the first thing you notice upon opening the box, right? But if there's anything that encapsulates Cosmic Encounter's design better than that the fact it is a boardgame without a board, it's that this omission is likely to completely pass you by upon first playing it. You might think that the distinct lack of a board in a boardgame would be obvious to anyone who played it. ![]() A pre-publication prototype of Cosmic Encounter, complete with egg-cup ships. "Just to set the tone," Peter adds, as I try to steer the interview back on course for the third or fourth time. There's a brief silence as everyone, including Bill and Peter's son Greg, pauses to consider this, followed by a flutter of surprised laughter. Midway through my conversation with the creators of Cosmic Encounter, the boardgame in which colourful aliens attempt to colonise each other's planets, Peter Olotka interrupts co-designer Bill Eberle to make a casual observation.
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