Chris-mic Encounter

It’s always sad when a good friend moves away. A couple of weeks ago, our friend Chris finished his PhD and moved on to pastures new. He’s a big fan of Cosmic Encounter, the chaotic game with more alien races to play as than I’ve had hot dinners, so we decided to get him a little present. Or should I say, make him a little present.

It would have been easy to pick up one of the many expansions for the game; he hasn’t managed to collect all of them yet. But we wanted something a bit more personal. Something to remind him of us whenever he opened the box. How about alien versions of each of us?

We started brainstorming rules. Some existing aliens made perfect fits: Alex has an innate ability to never win, so we gave him “The Loser” alien. Chris loves playing randomly, and “The Gambler” alien fit his character perfectly. However, we quickly realised we wanted to create unique aliens too! Peter’s ridiculous skill at engine building, Thom’s habit of popping out for a smoke, where were the aliens that captured these traits?

Before we knew it we had rules for 3 aliens each: one for each of the ‘difficulty’ levels that aliens are divided into. Green for simple to understand rules, yellow for more complicated rules, and red for bat-shit crazy game breaking rules! New aliens, however, created a new challenge: playtesting.

Cosmic Encounter isn’t well known for balanced rules, its creator having once remarked that “we don’t try to balance”, but we at least wanted to make sure our new elements were functional! Thing is, Chris owned the only copy of the game in our group. While various plans were floated to “borrow” it for a week, we decided to not give him any hint and armed with a pen and deck of blank playing cards, I built a quick and dirty prototype copy.

One evening we held a clandestine games night in which simulations were run, kickstarters were delivered, and ships of power sped between magic bowls. Aside from a few rules tweaks here and there, they all worked! Turns out Cosmic Encounter is a great game to mod!

Unfortunately, the rules were the easy part: now we had to make the cards. You can find a limited selection of alien cards online, mostly from Fantasy Flight Games preview articles, which can be used as a basis. Then its time to hit Photoshop (or the free to use GIMP, in our case). Check out the anatomy of a Cosmic Encounter alien card:

I started with the alien image, searching my friends’ Facebook accounts for suitable headshots and copying them in. There are plenty of good Youtube guides to help you with this part. I then used the “colourize” tool to match the colours with that of the alien. Much better:

The text is fairly easy, just create some white squares to blank out the current text and fill in your own. For fonts we downloaded BlairMdITC TT Medium for the titles and used one of the Garamonds for the body text, should you want to try this yourself. Then the easiest plan for the “Main Player Only” and Phase of rule effect bits at the bottom of the cards is to copy them from other alien cards.

The biggest challenge was the lights. To save time, I had decided to do one piece of artwork for each of us, then make three copies with each set of rules. Unfortunately this meant the lights had to be painstakingly trimmed from other cards and copied in. It’s doable, but very difficult to get perfect due to the glow and how that shines across the alien image window. Fortunately you can only spot these kinds of errors when you look closely!

The fun was only just getting started! Firstly, every alien card in Cosmic Encounter comes with a corresponding “Flare” card, hidden inside the main deck and providing a bonus to anyone who holds it. Board Game Geek fortunately had some pre-prepared templates we could use for them, it was just a case of adding the text. The “Gardener” alien we had created came with his own set of tech cards, which needed making too. Then we had to consider getting everything printed.

Living in the UK, this was even more of a challenge than normal. The playing card sized Flare and Tech cards were ok, since these are a standard size. The alien cards though are an awkward 115×172 mm. No one prints cards to that size as standard, not even The Game Crafter! After much hunting online, we finally found a local company that ran them as a custom job for us. They are heroes: Hussey Knights, Norwich.

Then I had to learn about DPI (dots per inch, the resolution once printed) and bleed areas (extra bit of artwork that give the printing company some room when cutting the cards). The alien cards have artwork right up to the edge of the card, so we had to carefully extend this in all directions from the edges of the cards. We did it by replicating the last couple of pixels around the entire edge, which worked well enough. Finally we were there! Files were sent and a few days later the cards came back in all their glory:

We even had some room in the minimum playing card order to make some special “Destiny” cards, where you have a combat against a specific player instead of a player colour:

A wonderfully ludicrous amount of effort, and I know we’ll have Chris back soon to play with them!