Cosmic Domination

Cosmic Domination is a print-and-play board game by  Thomas Staudt (Ashman on BGG) published on the Board Game Geek website that was inspired by an attempt to make a "Cosmic Encounter Express" game. It resolves its combat via use of a derivative mechanic based upon Button Men. Each die captured during a fight does not increase a player's score, it eliminates a portion of the population of the player who lost the die. It features eight different alien races, each with different abilities. Players fight over control of five separate planets, each associated with a specific color.

The game also incorporates three 'color dice,' d6 dice with no numbers, only one of six colors placed on the die. This die type has not been used in Button Men before.

According to Thomas,

> In 2010 / 2011 I got bitten by the PnP bug. So when I finally decided that I wanted to design games of my own and eventually publish them on BGG, my first approach was to scout my BGG game list and find games that did not have 'Express' versions published yet.
>
>

> The basic game mechanism was established early: You roll two color dice and have to take the available action at a planet of one of the rolled colors.
>
> Most of these actions would be resolved through combat, so this was where custom dice would finally come into the design. But while considering dice symbols and relations, I found that I was basically either inventing a new version of rock-paper-scissors and making it way too random even for a dice game or I was basically replacing numbers with symbols.
>
>

>
>
>
>
> So why not just use regular dice of different sizes?
>
> Combat using just a number of different sized dice? That's Button Men!
>
> I mocked up the first prototype to use the rules for Button Men for combat resolution, and it worked out perfectly.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I decided to keep this mechanism as it worked so well, so when the game was in a state that made publishing it look feasible, I contacted James Ernest, to ask for his approval for using his Button Men mechanism in a non-commercial project, which he kindly gave (although the Button Men rules are released under the Creative Commons license, this is not a direct use of them but derivative work, so getting permission was still required).
>
>

>
>
> Thanks, James.
>
>

>
>
>
>
> In general, the final rules were set pretty soon apart from some minor tweaks and the bot rules that enable the game to be played with less than three players.
>
> I constructed 8 combinations of dice to be used for each alien race, so all that was left to do was come up with abilities that were fun to play and make sure that weaker dice combinations were balanced with stronger abilities.
>
> I had about 50 strips with abilities printed out, which I assigned to the different aliens and playtested the hell out of them on my own before releasing my favorite combinations to friends and families.
>
> Some aliens are still deemed too good by some and too bad by others, which seems to me to be a good thing. Nobody would argue that all Cosmic Encounter races are equally powerful. Luck of the roll and the political implications of a (basically) 3+ player game hopefully take care of that.
>
>
>
>
> I could probably host playtests for years and not be 100% sure.
>
>

> I try to be careful not to infringe any copyrights etc. when publishing my games on BGG. My four previous games available here all use open source / public domain art.  There was free art for the galaxy background of the game board and for the dice symbols, but when searching for fitting artwork for the 8 Alien Race cards for the game, I did not find a set of 8 coherent pieces or anything but cartoon-like art. I wanted to make a visually compelling prototype, therefore I decided to handle this later and go with proprietary artwork and change this later. Then I found http://www.markusvogt.eu/ and the fantastic illustrations of starships in Markus Vogt's gallery. So instead of scavenging art from all around the web, I fathomed that if I had a single source, maybe I should try to get permission to use the art for a non-commercial publication, and Markus Vogt gave this permission, for which I am extremely grateful.
>
>

1. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182412/cosmic-domination
2. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1424400/cosmic-domination-designers-diary