Fan Designed Cosmic Expansion Set Discussion

Bill Eberle: This alien is now in its Play Test << BETA >> phase. Let us know how it goes.

Bill Martinson: If your intention is to lock all other players out of the discard pile for the entire game, this will create a conflict with effects like Wild Chronos.

Bill Eberle: Ok. We'll keep a list of all issues . . . and come up with a process to finalize decisions about these sorts of things. Our first take was to let it override anything that would allow another player to look at any of the cards in the discard pile. When we have the full list of issues concerning “discard pile rights,” we can revisit that rule and decide what we want to do.

Gleb Semenjuk: We tried using this power with our gaming group just today. It added kinda a lot of downtime for searching through the discards. Maybe it was just us, but were left unimpressed of its dynamics. :-(

Peter Olotka: Good feedback. Perhaps the Grifter actually has the discard pile in its possession so that it can peruse when not a main player so as to be ready. As to possible conflicts..all aliens have conflicts with something / artifacts / aliens / flares / destiny / tech ...when we have the cross check set up we will have our list for each pice of content in this set and work them all through.

Peter Olotka: Design Alert: Announcing the Parallel Processing FanAssisted Cosmic Encounter Cross-Checking Computer ......I am making a Google Docs spread sheet which will allow everyone to pick an alien, artifact or other listed existing content and be the responsible player who checks it against the content in progress. The acronym is PPFACECCC pronounced faceck (Fun, huh?).. So if everyone can invite a couple of more players into this Design Group we will be well covered. I love this because it goes to the heart of solving the difficulty of adding Cosmic Content.. the dreaded cross-check! Details after Thanksgiving!

James Albright: Peter, I understand your point about how aliens are cousins. Healer and Observer are cousins, and so are Will and Dictator. However, you don't want to print an alien that does literally everything that one alien does and more, right? For example, imagine printing an alien that wins the encounter automatically whenever he plays a Negotiate and wins automatically whenever he plays reinforcements during an encounter. This would be Pacifist's entire power, but better. Would you print this alien?

In almost 100% of situations, Grifter is just plain better than Filch. Filch takes an opponent's played encounter card, while Grifter can take anyone's played encounter card at any time. I mean, people play Cosmic Encounter because variety is fun. It's not an “artificial” drawback if it makes Grifter more defined- a lot of aliens have these kinds of limitations on their powers, like how Dictator can't control his own Destiny flip. Some aliens even have a risk put forth when they use their power, like Gambler could lose extra ships, or Leviathian could lose a planet.

I think it's fine if Grifter and Filch are similar. Warhawk and Pacifist are similar too, but one does not always trump the other player. There's some pros and cons to Warhawk and some completely different pros and cons to Pacifist. Is there something I'm missing? In general, are there any cons to picking Grifter over Filch?

Bill Eberle: Good arguments, James. Perhaps, we will go back to requiring Grifter to pay for Cons, e.g. discard normally one non-Encounter card.

Jack Reda: That is why Grifter needs to dump an artifact/flare in order to use his power. That is the tradeoff.

Bill Eberle: We can change the Beta description to include that rule. We'll also add that Grifter takes control of the discard pile to help in its planning and not slow up the game per Gleb's playtest and Peter's suggestion above.

Jack Reda: Limiting Grifter to encounter cards out of the discard pile will really cut down on the time. He won't have to read all the flares and artifacts- just look for the highest number (most of the time).