Team Cosmic is a variant for Cosmic Encounter introduced in FFG's Cosmic Alliance expansion. In keeping with the large-group theme of Cosmic Alliance, in the Team Cosmic variant, players play on two-person teams and try to win together, with the first team(s) to have both of its players reach a victory condition winning the game. It is officially recommended that this variant only be used with groups of five or more players.
Rules[]
(Adapted from the Cosmic Alliance rulebook)
Setup[]
Set up the game as normal, with the following additional steps:
- After players choose player colors but before they set up their home systems, take one destiny card of each player color and shuffle them.
- Deal out these destiny cards faceup into piles of two cards each. Each pile represents a team of two players who will attempt to win the game together. In a game with an odd number of players, there will be one leftover destiny card; this player (the “odd player”) does not have a partner and plays to win by him- or herself.
- Partners sit across from each other at the table in order to spread out their turns as evenly as possible. If there is an odd player in the game, place a planet of an unused player color in seating order across the table from him or her.
- Take the destiny cards used to determine the teams and shuffle them into the rest of the destiny deck.
- When choosing aliens during setup, players may not discuss with their partners which alien they are choosing to play.
Gameplay[]
This variant uses all of the standard rules and victory conditions, with the following modifications:
- A player cannot have an encounter against his or her partner. During the destiny phase, if a player draws a destiny card targeting his or her partner, the player may either have an encounter with another player's foreign colony in his or her partner’s home system or draw again.
- The main players in each encounter always automatically invite their partners as allies, and players may not ally against their partners. However, in an encounter against other players, partners may each ally with different sides.
- If a player gains a colony in his or her partner’s system, it counts as a home colony for that player and not a foreign colony.
- In order to win the game, each player on a team must either gain enough foreign colonies to win or complete an alternate victory condition. The game does not end until both players of a team have completed a victory condition. If multiple teams win at the same time, it is a shared win.
- Each time a player gains a foreign colony, he or she may allow his or her partner to gain the foreign colony instead. The player returns his or her ships to his or her other colonies and his or her partner places an equal number of ships on the planet from his or her other colonies instead.
- Players may not show the cards in their hands to their partners, but they may talk openly about their strategy and cards so that all players can hear, including mentioning specific cards in their hands.
- Since the odd player does not have a partner, the odd player only needs to complete a victory condition by him- or herself to win. Also, the odd player receives twice as many turns as any other player. When the turn order arrives at the unused planet across from the odd player, the odd player receives a full extra turn. Afterwards, turn order continues from the unused planet.