Cosmoctopus – The Incredible Inky Immortal!

The celestial gaze of Cosmoctopus falls upon you! As devotees to the Great Inky One, harness the power of bizarre objects and experiences to better understand this mysterious galactic cephalopod.

It sounds ridiculous (and funny) but that’s the opening to the rulebook of Cosmoctopus, a recent release from Lucky Duck Games designed by the talented Henry Audubon. This galaxy-spanning resource management game supports 1-4 players and takes one to two hours to play. It’s rated for gamers 14+, but a precocious 12-year-old can try their hand at managing a worshipful cult of Lovecraftian lore.

Setup

A game of Cosmoctopus starts with laying out the Inky Realm tiles. Shuffle the four special Realm tiles and randomly choose one to put out with the eight basic tiles in a three-by-three grid (there are alternate layouts in the instruction book). Put Cosmoctopus’s head on the +3 Stars tile.

Shuffle the Devotee Deck and reveal three face-up in a line.

Give each player a summoning tile, five devotee cards for their hand, and two of each resource. Keep everything else nearby.

Gameplay

The goal of Cosmoctopus is to gain eight tentacles to summon the Great Inky One himself. Cosmoctopus is an engine builder, with devotee cards of four different types that contribute to the engine:

• Scriptures: Black cards, powered by ink. Scriptures give permanent resource discounts.
• Relics: Yellow cards, powered by coins. Relics provide ongoing effects.
• Hallucinations: Red cards, powered by whispers. Hallucinations give powerful one-time effects.
• Constellations: Blue cards, powered by stars. Constellations are the most common way to gain tentacles, and often import some other additional benefit.

All four card types require a certain number of specific and possibly generic resources to play them.

Constellations have an additional cost shown on the card. In the direction of the arrows, players must put resources when they earn them on the cards. Once they fill every icon on the card, they have completed it.

On Your Turn

On a player’s turn, they move the head of the Cosmoctopus one space orthogonally on the grid of Realm tiles, then take the benefit awarded on that tile. Players may choose to pay one resource per extra space to move more, but they only get the benefit on the final tile.

Then, a player may play a card from their hand if they have sufficient resources.

Finally, they discard down to eight of everything; eight devotee cards and eight of each resource. To indicate they have finished their turn, the active player turns the head of the Cosmoctopus to face the next player.

First Contact

The first time a player gains a tentacle, they can choose one of the face-up First Contact cards in addition to their tentacle reward. These are unique cards, one of each devotee card type. These confer benefits just like other devotee cards, but they are unique. For example, Eternal Offering allows the player to move the Cosmoctopus an additional space on their turn for free.

Forbidden Knowledge

If a player manages to amass 13 resources of a certain type, they can turn them in any time on their turn for the appropriate Forbidden Knowledge token of that color (there is only one of each). These tokens give the player TWO tentacles immediately. Resource discounts from Scriptures can reduce this 13 resource threshold.

End Game

As soon as a player gains their eighth tentacle, they have summoned Cosmoctopus! They take the Cosmoctopus head and put it in their summoning tile. They have won!

Private Investigator

Cosmoctopus has a coop/single player mode with an automaton who is a Private Investigator. There are four different difficulties for the PI, but even the easiest is pretty difficult. Essentially, the PI is also trying to investigate the Cosmoctopus – and if he manages to collect eight tentacles before ALL of the players, he wins.

Different Layouts

If a three-by-three grid sounds uninteresting, there are a few different layouts in the rulebook just to mix it up. There is even a disconnected galaxy with a “cosmic bridge” between them.

Impressions

The first thing we should note here is that this is a game about managing your cult full of space octopus worshipers. For some of us this was silly, but for others it was a little uncomfortable. It is certainly personal whether or not this is a problem for you and your family.

Cosmoctopus feels to me like a game pulled directly out of a 1960’s sci-fi cult thriller, and the art reflects this. The gameplay is simple and the basic iconography is easy to understand. The game does start to trip up over the weight of all the different variances of each icon, trying to convey a lot of different ideas. The game includes a player aid, but even still we found ourselves going back to the rulebook for specific card or timing clarifications. This definitely pushes the age range up a little bit for me, and so I agree with the 14+ on the box.

As players play cards and their resource-gathering powers grow, the crescendo of domino-like turns can grow to almost unmanageable levels. Of course, you can always play the game straight. However, imagine growing an engine that gives you one type of resource if an event occurs, and receiving that resource type triggers another effect, and so on. Most of the time these effects end up hilariously overpowered, but it can feel finicky to try to manage every effect, especially if it creates loops.

Final Thoughts

Cosmoctopus offers a ton of replayability and gobs of decision space. There’s no one way to win the game, though there certainly are strategies that are easier to play. I have enjoyed every time I’ve sat down with this game, seeing different players try different ways to get ahead. It’s possible, in time, that one strategy will win out, but so far it has been a delightful experience.

If you’d like to explore the cosmos in search of your own plum colored galactic cephalopod, you can pick up a copy of Cosmoctopus directly from Lucky Duck Games, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Cosmoctopus from Lucky Duck Games for this review.

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