Cosmic Frog is a game of eating land and expelling it from the body.
Interpret that how you wish.
A game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale.
Cosmic Frog Game Play
TLDR Eat or steal land tiles to place on your board and score their variety and pattern.
Theme
There was a full A4 page blurb in the rulebook explaining everything but it was quite dull. I have no idea why you’re frogs in space, what the tiles represent or why you’re eating them.
Setup
This took AGES. There are layers of tiles all over the board which took a long time to stack.
Components & Artwork
The frogs are OK, the Oomph crystals are those nice sparkly ones you see in other games.
Ease of Teaching
This would be very easy to teach if the helper sheets provided even the basic information on the actions available. They spend a lot of time explaining things that aren’t really needed rather than how the actions work.
Cosmic Frog Summary
Async powers and turn order on the flip of a card says Cosmic Encounter to me… I mean, they even took half the name.
In Encounter, players take turns and who they go against is random. For Cosmic Frog, turn order is random but there are so many cards you can be a while in between turns.
In Encounter, the player’s powers are game-breaking. In Cosmic Frog, they’re alright… They’re so average that at several points in the game you get a chance to get a random one from the deck to replace the one you have.
I didn’t bother, they were much of a muchness.
To sum up I think there are a lot of games where you move around collecting things. I don’t think this is any more interesting than the others. It would be harsh to compare it to say Arcadia Quest or Starcadia Quest: Showdown but that’s the level of games available in this space.
There actually is very little price difference between the base game for each so I would check those out.
Jesta ThaRogue