This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting (i.e. voting for) it. Please make it clear for when I check the bets later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.
Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;
Yeah, pratically all that Wilson guy does is sweep the floors at the FFG offices and badly cough doom cough cough descent.
I never said he didn't do quality designs of his own, just that he isn't at all what made Cosmic great. However, passive aggressively suggesting that Descent is something he shouldn't have just swept up with the rest of the floor trash during his FFG janitor duty is some bullshit. Fuck Descent.
It's total bullshit to give Kevin Wilson credit for Cosmic. He did come cool minor tweaks and additions, basically a few house rules level and homebrewed aliens, to a monstrous classic. The stuff he did add is generally great, but hardly worthy of heaping praise.
I played the original Cosmic Encounter a couple of times, and never again. Without very specific rules regarding the timing of various effects, the games got bogged down in big unresolvable arguments. I don't know if the timing was greatly clarified in later versions before the FFG one, but I do know that the FFG Cosmic Encounter does a fantastic job of nailing down timing.
What Kevin did for FFG's Cosmic was what a good editor does. There is a lot of stuff out there for the game and he managed to very successfully trim it down to a very playable game. No-one has criticised any aliens he included for being unplayable, no-one thinks the tech deck is a bad addition, no-one has criticised his choice of flares being kept in hand, he added the colony scoring markers to stop sneaky victories (and made the game more transparent).
I haven't seen a single rules dispute when playing with the FFG version and we used to have so many when I played in my teens with the Mayfair edition. Was it probably easier to get Cosmic so good than say Arkham Horror. No doubt it was, but that doesn't mean it wasn't quite difficult to do. Just look at the mess that is the Avalon Hill version of Cosmic. Its funny but people regarded Cosmic as being out of print for many years because the Avalon Hill version was so bad that it did not count as Cosmic Encounter.
The timing rules were added by Mayfair in their edition (although naturally there were some problems).
Really one of Mayfair's best contributions to that game.
in my opinion, Kevin did (and continues to do) a very solid editorial job on Cosmic, which I happen to think is important. Other people may not view editing and curating as difficult job, but it certainly can be. I'm not going to jump in the swamp of whether it's more important than original work, but it's not trivial.
(er, yeah. MuMu and say the same thing at the same time. Fnord.)
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