Cosmoctopus Review

What lies beneath? Or better still, what lies beyond? You see, the tentacles on show here belong to an octopus, but it’s no ordinary octopus. This is the Cosmoctopus, a celestial cephalopod with untold power in its octet of appendages. It’s a pretty lightweight engine-building game that’s immediately accessible and a lot of fun. A small footprint, cool tentacles to collect, super-speedy turns – what’s not to like? Honestly, not much, Cosmoctopus is a fantastic gateway-level game that anyone can enjoy, just make sure you play the correct length of game if you don’t want to lose players’ attention.

Suckers for worship

The idea behind the game puts you in the position of a worshipper of the great Cosmoctopus. Not much is known about the spacefaring creature, but as devotees, you are trying to bring him to your realm and to prove yourself the greatest, most devout worshipper.

So how does this all work as a game? It’s basically an engine-builder with a bit of point-to-point movement and resource management thrown in for good measure. There’s a 3×3 grid of tiles on the table and the plastic octopus head sits atop one of them. On your turn you’ve got to move the head to an adjacent tile and then collect whatever’s displayed on it. After you’ve done that you can play a card from your hand if you have the resources to pay for it.

Cards fall into one of four types, each with their own effects. Black cards – Scriptures – show a resource on them and give you that as a permanent discount for the rest of the game. Yellow cards – Relics – boost certain actions. It might give you an extra yellow resource every time you gain one for example, which might influence how you play for the rest of the game. Hallucinations are the red cards which give you a one-and-done bonus. Finally, there are Constellation (blue) cards, and these are the ones most of your focus will go on.

Once you’ve played a Constellation to your player area, any time in the future you gain the relevant resource you can add it to the card instead. Fill a card and you get to take a tentacle and add it to your own Summoning tile. Get eight tentacles and you complete the summoning of his most glorious octopusness and win the game.

Putting it all out there

I don’t normally go as in-depth with an explanation of the mechanisms and effects of a game as I have above, but it’s with good reason. If you’ve played any kind of engine-building game before, you know enough to be able to play Cosmoctopus now, which is a testament to how clean and simple the game design is. The designer, Henry Audubon, does this style of game so well. His previous hit, Parks (read my review here), is the perfect example of what I’m talking about.

What I really like in Cosmoctopus is the addition of the point-to-point movement of the octo head. Throwing in the spatial navigation element is great, it breaks your train of thought up enough to keep your brain whirring, without making things so complicated you forget what you were doing. It also gives the game an avenue to make things interesting and trickier once you’ve got the hang of it. Moving to adjacent tiles on a 3×3 grid is pretty easy, especially knowing you can spend resources to move extra spaces. When the layout looks like an S or an O, some tiles can end up quite a distance away.

Little touches like this in a game matter, especially when the game is aimed at new gamers, or fans of lighter games. People who probably don’t have collections of games in the hundreds, who buy a game expecting to play it more than once or twice a year (some of you out there are probably feeling seen right now). A smaller box, cheap price, and varied replayability really matter, and I applaud Paper Fort and Lucky Duck for delivering on it.

Keeping an eye on the time

I want to take a moment to call out something important, and that’s the length of the game. Be wary of how long the game takes. On page 12 of the rulebook it tells you how to play a shorter game by giving all players 3 tentacles to start the game with. If you’re playing it with younger or less-experienced players, I strongly recommend doing this.

Once you understand how to play Cosmoctopus properly you’ll find you have really fruitful turns. You’ll be gathering up handfuls of resources, playing a card every turn, and most importantly of all, fulfilling parts of multiple constellation cards at once. It’s a great feeling when you get your engine purring like that, but it doesn’t usually happen for most players’ first games. When it’s not firing on all cylinders, progress can be slow growing, and those tentacles can take a long time to emerge from the astral depths.

In my first game with my son, it took ages to get those first tentacles sprouting. Given that turns are pretty snappy, it meant that we had a huge number of turns each with the octopus pinging back and forth on the tiles like a pinball. I could see his interest waning, and I totally understood. If you want to bring new players into the hobby, you might only get one good chance so don’t spurn it because of misguided gamer pride telling you ‘play it properly or not at all’. Basically, get over yourself, play the short game, and make sure everyone has a good time.

Final thoughts

Confession time. When I first saw pictures of Cosmoctopus when the Kickstarter fulfilment started landing on doorsteps, it didn’t fill me with excitement. I committed the cardinal sin of judging a game by how light and thin I assumed it was. I was wrong to do so, because Cosmoctopus has a lot going on in terms of game design and in terms of how important a gateway game it could be for some people.

The simple turns combined with bright visuals and wonderfully tactile pieces are a winner. You can happily teach a table of four how to play in a few minutes and see the cogs turning after just a couple of turns. If your players get on with Cosmoctopus it opens a whole world of possibilities for next-step games. Terraforming Mars and Wingspan become distinctly doable, and from there – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell some of you how deep and slippery that rabbit hole becomes.

There’s a really clever automa player you can introduce to the game to either play solo, or add to a multiplayer game to turn it into a co-op game instead. It’s really easy to run and opens up the potential to lead players by the hand in co-op games to really help them understand how strategy works.

Heavy gamers are unlikely to enjoy Cosmoctopus as anything more than an occasional filler game, but fans of lighter games, families dipping their toes in the waters of modern board games, and those of you who are part of a group that welcomes new members from time to time will take a lot from it. Just playing with the pieces is enough to bring a smile to your face, and the rulebook’s suggestion to turn the head to look at the next player is genius. I’ve got a lot of respect for Henry’s game design, and Cosmoctopus just deepens it. A clever, engaging, fun engine-builder that delivers on its goals, and then some.

Review copy kindly provided by Lucky Duck Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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