Tech Tantra Thursday - Bill Eberle

As a follow-up to my October 6 article about the Game of Inventing Games and our special tribute to Steve Jobs and the spirit of people who spend parts of their lives working and playing to “create new things” today I'd like to pay tribute to all of the people who have added their own ideas to the game of Cosmic Encounter®.

One of our goals in creating Cosmic Encounter® was to encourage creativity; we were happy when players invented and experimented with new aliens and other ideas which they discovered were a fit for the way they liked to play Cosmic Encounter®. For us that was Cosmic! The spirit behind Cosmic Encounter® was our desire to create a game that was really different and that meant going out and finding new things and new ways of doing things. In our own way we were “exploring space” by imaging new kinds of games and new ways to play games. And it was something we wanted everybody to do. Explore space! Don't take anything for granted. Explore everything! Change everything!

I expect there are hundreds and perhaps even thousands of interesting ideas and “home brew” aliens for Cosmic Encounter® which most of us will never find out about, but when you look, you'll find that many of the interesting Cosmic ideas created over the years are easily found.

One way to see some of the depth and range of alien power ideas is to spend some time exploring Jack Reda's site The Warp and explore his Alien Power database which he calls The Amazing Power Thingy.

In The Warp's alien power database, which was originally created by Marcus Porter “over a decade ago” Marcus says, you can now explore 1,726 alien powers linked to 6 commercial enterprises including the original Eon Products releases that started this alien creativity phenomenon, and the 110 individual alien power inventors and authors (with some repeats, e.g. in commercial sets based on the original or previously published alien powers. And there are also instructions for submitting new alien powers to be included in the database.

There is also an expanding database of information about Cosmic at BoardGameGeek including a forum dedicated to new Cosmic aliens and other BoardGameGeek Cosmic variants.

The next page shows lists of inventors/authors from The WARP database and the number of powers linked to each inventor/author.