Cosmoctopus – What’s Eric Playing?

Base price: $40.
1 – 4 players.
play time: 60 – 90 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4

Full disclosure: A review copy of Cosmoctopus was provided by Lucky Duck games.

Eh, let’s just come out the gate swinging on this one. I don’t like H.P. Lovecraft. Really xenophobic guy, huge racist (don’t read his letters; I promise you, not worth it), and honestly, as a Black person with an interest in fantasy, sci-fi, and related genres, the shadow he casts over all of it because he’s afraid of buildings or syphilis or something is exhausting. It occasionally makes it hard to even enjoy adjacent things, like Arkham Horror or, really, any Cthulhu game because even if an author or designer is very careful about how they surgically excise the art from the artist, it kind of all ends up similarly tainted. I’m very proud of the ongoing legacy of people of color to try and create a new legacy for this eldritch mythos that doesn’t depend on this guy in particular, but boy howdy, it’s a long road and it gives me the ick, sometimes. For a good example of this that does not give me the ick, consider reading The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. I was a bit wary of Cosmoctopus because it’s still Cthulhu-adjacent, with its worship of a tentacled horror from beyond the stars that will usher in a great wave of madness, but thankfully, it’s honestly goofy enough that I can forget about all the Lovecraftian Horror at the root of things. Out of respect, I usually call it cosmic or eldritch horror, anyways. But I digress. This was a long way of leading into a Cosmoctopus review, but honestly, it’s nice to get this energy out sometimes. Let’s talk about the game.

In Cosmoctopus, The Great Inky One has called to you in your dreams, your nightmares, and your waking hours. He is ready to emerge from the cosmic substrata and rule over all of existence, or at least be really cute. He’s somewhat ineffable, that way. You and your fellow cultists want to be the one who enables his great emergence into our reality though, so you must help him break through the boundaries of space and time to become whole and perfect and, I want to say, tentacular? That feels like a word. Spellcheck didn’t flag it, which is wild. So build your engine, collect Forbidden Knowledge, and open your eyes and mind to what exists just outside of our reality. Will you be able to usher in a new age at the hands of our great and fearful mollusk king? Or will you just end up trapped in the throes of his eternal madness?

Contents

Setup

Start up with the tiles: a few of them have stars on them. Grab one of those randomly and shuffle them with the other tiles and make a 3×3 grid:

Place Cosmoctopus on the 3 Stars (teal) space, and set the tentacles aside:

Set the First Contact cards aside:

Shuffle the Devotee cards:

Deal each player five of those cards. Give each player a Summoning tile:

Also give each player two resources of each type. Set the corresponding Forbidden Knowledge tokens nearby:

Players after the first player get increasing Generic Discount Tokens. You should be ready to start!

Gameplay

This one’s not too rough. Your goal is simple: you want eight tentacles to be summoned so that the Great Inky One may emerge from his home amongst the stars and galaxies to subsume the entire world into darkness. Or something like that. Maybe you just like octopodes.

Each turn, you must move Cosmoctopus from his current space to a new one. For each space you move after the first, you must spend a resource (noting that cards in your hand count as resources of their color). Once you do, resolve the effect on the tile, and then you may play a card from your hand by spending resources of that type (along with, usually, any other resource, represented by the gray diamond below the first cost). cards you play usually either have an immediate effect, boost the resources you get, discount other card costs, or become Constellations, which you can place matching resources on as you gain them.

If you have 13 or more of a resource, you can see into infinity and gain Forbidden Knowledge. Spend 13 of that resource (including cards and specific discounts, where indicated) to gain the corresponding Forbidden Knowledge token of that type, if it hasn’t already been gained. This gives you two tentacles, as well! If it’s your first time getting a Forbidden Knowledge token, you also get a First Contact card in the color of your choice with its own effect.

At the end of your turn, you cannot have more than eight of anything; it’s disrespectful to the Great Inky One. If you have more than eight of any one resource or more than eight cards in hand, discard down to eight.

play continues until one player successfully gains their eighth tentacle. They immediately win!

Player Count Differences

Player count can be a little weird with this one, just because of how movement works. With two players, generally, your opponent just can’t move to the spot that you previously occupied when you played you turn. That’s fine. With more players, that symmetry and balance are thrown off a bit. We got stuck in a game where player A wanted to be on one side of the board and the other two players preferred the other side, so one player was always stuck trying to move back to where they wanted to be. It’s not bad, though it was a little frustrating at times. The game feels a bit smoother with fewer players, since you’re not just dealing with the randomness of the board or the randomness of what’s chosen; you’re also dealing with the randomness of which cards are available. That cycling will be more exaggerated with more players, but it might work against you if you’re not careful. I tend to prefer two-player games, as a result.

Strategy

• Discounting cards are a good way to start an engine up. You can get better cards for cheap! This does help when you discount Scripture cards, so you can rack up discounts on discounts until you’re basically playing cards for free. Just remember that discounts alone won’t win you a game; I’ve made that mistake enough times in Splendor.
• Your First Contact choice can be pretty helpful. There’s some debate about the “most useful” of them, but I think it’s largely contextual. Just try to figure out which card works best with your current strategy and engine.
• Hoarding resources isn’t necessarily useful, given the limits on everything. Your best bet is to shoot to end up with 8 so that you can drop a big get next turn and score a Forbidden Knowledge. One game, though, I did just have a bunch of resources available and used them to ensure that I could go anywhere I wanted every turn, which was nice. Still, that 8 limit is very real and not as many as you’d think.
• Try to have a backup plan every turn, in case the space you want is occupied or too far away. Where you wanna go is occupied a surprising amount of the time. It’s almost like players want similar things. Having some alternate options can be useful so that you don’t just spend your turn getting resources and then immediately passing. Try making progress on a different, also-useful card in your hand.
• cards that get you additional resources? Also good. The Relics can be very handy if you’re trying to make a run on Forbidden Knowledge, or if you just want the resources necessary to buy lots of cards. If that’s the thing you’re shooting for, try buying Echo cards; they usually let you play another card again after you play them, so you can combo your way to something, at least.
• Constellation cards are a good way to make up for potentially-crummy turns. Even if you can’t afford stuff, you might be able to get a critical resource for your Constellation card? That’s never bad, and you can sometimes get tentacles that way!
• Sometimes an Echo card is what you need to get over the hump to some Forbidden Knowledge. They have a variety of useful, one time effects; sometimes you get a ton of resources or extra cards or even extra moves! Extra Move Actions are particularly potent, since you can use those to get to the spot that was blocked at the start of your turn or you can use them to collect even more stuff.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• This is a very goofy theme for a game. I was very worried about the cosmic horror angle, but they seem to have very cleverly sidestepped any of that aforementioned nonsense and gone for the cute and silly angle. It works. It softens all the “madness” stuff that these genres usually peddle and you end up with a cute octopus. What’s not to like?
• The little tentacles and Cosmoctopus are delightful. The sculpts for the tokens are extremely good. Lots to like, here.
• There’s a lot of setup differences that can make the game different, which is interesting. The basic layout can have a lot of differences game-to-game with just the singular bonus tile getting swapped around, but you can also change things up by changing up the layout entirely and making the game a lot more complicated that way. I particularly like using the space portal to make two sub-boards that are effectively otherwise disconnected; lots of interesting stuff can happen there.
• Kinda by the game’s nature you’re going to have to take different strategies and approaches every time. The deck of cards is pretty massive, so you’re unlikely to get the exact same set of cards and tiles each time. I’ve done heavy focusing on each type of card to different effects in different games, and that’s pretty cool and fun.
• I like the idea of a cooperative variant, since that encourages players to move fairly fluidly together rather than just getting in each others’ way. Cooperative engine-building is a lot of fun! It’s one of the reasons we all like Daybreak so much, though I need to get better at passing cards to my other players. I guess after a hundred games of it I still have a lot to learn.
• It’s also nice that they have variants to increase the difficulty (different board configurations and drafting starting hands) and decrease the difficulty (recommended starting hands). Thinking about how to tailor your game to player needs is always cool. Letting players have control of how difficult they want the game to be is great! It also helps the game achieve more long-term staying power in a player’s library, because it can be slightly different things to different people.

Mehs

• Definitely a game that I regret playing on a glass table. You have to pick up so many cards that are just flat on the table; you’ll really want to play this on a mat or something. Save your fingernails the trouble (and the poor cards).

Cons

• There’s not really any reason for the First Contact cards, which should be set aside and gained through different means, to have the same back as the other standard cards. I get that they have specially-marked costs, but why do they have the Devotee Deck backs at all? They’re not placed in the Devotee Deck during the standard game, so it just makes it easier to lose four cards within the giant deck.
• There’s a lot of calculation math happening pretty consistently throughout the game, so if you’re not looking for something on the mathier end, this may not be your scene. Some players aren’t stoked to be doing a bunch of minor calculations every turn, and that’s totally fine. I mention this because it’s still pretty math-heavy, so if that’s not your vibe (and it does not have to be), you may not enjoy this one. The math isn’t particularly hard; there’s just a lot of it.

Overall: 7.75 / 10

Overall, I think Cosmoctopus is fun! There are a lot of little calculations that you have to make regularly, granted, but that’s just how the game goes. Little tokens, math of how much you need to spend on something or how the various discounts you have work and overlap. It can be a bit to keep track of. But this is, impressively, a fairly-approachable engine-building game. I find with a lot of engine-building games, you’re largely at the mercy of whoever knows the most cards. They have a sense of what’s available and how they can use it or wait to exploit it in just the right way to maximize their impact. Here, that’s not really as much of an issue. The cards have relatively consistent and predictable patterns to them (there are, for instance, discounts of 1, 2, or 3 for all resources and Relics that give you +1, +2, or +3 for each possible resource), so once you’ve seen a few exemplars you can kind of figure out what you need to do well. Plus, the cards aren’t that complicated. This isn’t Terraforming Mars. They generally do one thing and then you can just move on. I’m not entirely sure why the First Contact cards don’t look more different than the standard ones, but I’m inclined to chalk that up to manufacturing and not wanting to print another sheet or something like that. I don’t entirely understand manufacturing yet but I’m working on it. Check back in another thousand reviews or so. I’ll be a pro. In the meantime, however, if you’re looking for a easy-to-pick-up engine-building game, you enjoy the occasional combo and resource collection, or you just like the idea of a space octopus, I’d recommend Cosmoctopus! I’ve liked playing it.

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