Overview & How to Play

Cosmic Encounter Duel is a 2 player spinoff of the highly political game, Cosmic Encounter, where you were supposed to play with a whole bunch of people with backstabbing abound.

In this duel, you’re trying to control 5 planets to win the game, by engaging in head-to-head duels over battles with 1 opponent, where you’ll each be using one of many unique alien powers. To fight, players will secretly choose between 1-4 ships to send in, then secretly pick a card from their hand to boost their fighting strength, as well as use a cardboard stand called a Tactic to affect the fighting ships.

After all Tactics and cards have been selected, players reveal them, then see who wins the fight, with their ‘Clout’ (yeah this game is silly), AKA fighting strength. The winner takes control of the planet, the loser retreats.

That’s the gist of gameplay, we’ll get into the silliness in between below.

Pros

One of the huge draws to the original Cosmic Encounter was the capacity to mix and match the asymmetric alien powers. And this duel version absolutely has that with 27 aliens with amazing abilities, which are all entirely new to the Cosmic Encounter world. There’s ways to manipulate tactic stands with a Cheater, or a literal TWO-FACED Politician, where if you lie about your Tactic played you get a bonus. Oh, and there’s some alien powers with alternate win conditions, which is super intriguing.

In fact, the OG alien powers have been pushed to become ‘Envoys’, which are like allies you can befriend with special powers, so that’s a great rush of nostalgia, and actually game changing to use, like the “Masochist” that will win you the entire game if you run out of ships.

There is actually quite a bit of decisionmaking when it comes to gameplay too. Like, you want to save up, and watch out for the ‘42’ card in the game that can practically win anyone a fight. Also, all the cards are in players’ decks, meaning there’s a deckbuilding element as you can steal cards from your opponent permanently, or add additional cards called ‘Reinforcements’ that you can discard to boost strength.

Cosmic Encounter Duel just really makes the ‘dueling’ aspect rich with mindgames, with so many things to bluff over. There’s ways to copy your opponents’ cards, lose fights on purpose to get some additional benefit, or the frequent management of Tactic powers in conjunction to current alien abilities.

The game just is highly replayable, that always makes complete sense with regards to the Cosmic Encounter world, where you’re going through silly contests to become a “certified” member of the cosmic citizenship council.

Cons & Nitpicks

But Cosmic Duel has some really interesting pitfalls, where while it is super forgiving for newcomers, and while meant to be taken very casually, the systems are NOT easy to casually navigate. There’s just a sheer quantity of mechanics piled into a shorter game.

Like, there’s 3 mind game instances for each duel: ships, Tactics, and plans. There’s lots of additional text that constantly affects battle: ship bonuses, loser benefits, unique aliens, befriended Envoys. Then there’s alternate win conditions! Are we playing a troll game with all the jokes on the cards, or a think-y game with the things to keep track of? Remember, the original Cosmic Encounter didn’t have nearly this many mechanics, because the points of interest came from other people, not stuff written in a rulebook.

This duel keeps shooting itself in the foot by trying really hard to emulate the chaotic feeling of Cosmic Encounter. Instead of yelling as you sabotage your friends, this game tries to capture that chaos with its 3 destiny decks, where AFTER you fight, you twosome are led down a rabbit hole of non-combat things just happening. Now the game is forcing this chaos by having cards seriously affect you, not having the drama occur from players themselves, which can feel like the entirety of the game is sometimes beholden to random card flips. You can be just about to win in the next turn, but then you flip a event card, and suddenly your Envoy win condition may disappear. You can’t even have fun failing to convince others, since this is a 2 player game, rather if you’re gonna get screwed by the cards here, its gonna happen whether you have an amazing silver tongue or not.

Final Thoughts

With its random Wormhole of Destiny, where you could even end up playing Go Fish for some time, we have to end that this game is just an average recommendation. As long as you don’t mind the above average complexity for a casual game, this can be a replayable thrill for you and a partner to indulge your silly sci-fi wants. There’s definitely no shortage of things to trigger and remember, giving you plenty of ingredients for this cosmic universe, you’ll have to decide whether the reading is overwhelming for you.