''Cosmic Coasters'' is a

board game Board games are tabletop games that typically use . These pieces are moved or placed on a pre-marked board (playing surface) and often include elements of table, card, role-playing, and miniatures games as well. Many board games feature a comp ...

Andrew Looney Andrew J. Looney (born November 5, 1963) is a game designer and computer programmer. He is also a photographer, a cartoonist, a video-blogger, and a marijuana-legalization advocate. Andrew and Kristin Looney together founded the games company Loo ...

and published by

Looney Labs Looney Labs, Inc. is a small game company based in College Park, Maryland, United States. It is named after its founders, Andrew Looney and Kristin Looney, and is best known for creating the Fluxx line of card games. The company has three U.S. pat ...

. In 2002, ''Cosmic Coasters'' won the

Origins Award The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so (for example) the 1979 aw ...

for ''Best Abstract Board Game of 2001''. The game is played on custom bar coasters bearing the image of a

Galilean moon The Galilean moons (), or Galilean satellites, are the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They were first seen by Galileo Galilei in December 1609 or January 1610, and recognized by him as satellites of Jupiter ...

on one side and a rules summary on the other. The coasters are designed for use as actual coasters as well as game boards, and the game does not use anything unlikely to be in a bar (such as

dice Dice (singular die or dice) are small, throwable objects with marked sides that can rest in multiple positions. They are used for generating random values, commonly as part of tabletop games, including dice games, board games, role-playing g ...

Gameplay

Each coaster represents a space colony with four "factories", four "control points" and one "teleporter". Each player takes seven distinctive counters - for example, coins of the same denomination - and places them on their coaster. Players take turns to move. Each turn, they may Teleport, Build, or Move. ;Teleport:So long as a player is the only player to control (have a counter on) two or more of the control points on a coaster, they may teleport a counter from that coaster's teleporter onto another coaster, or out of the game. If they teleport onto another counter, that counter is destroyed. ;Build:So long as a player controls the two control points adjacent to an empty factory, and they have spare counters, they may put one of their spare counters on that factory. ;Move:The player may move one of their counters to an adjacent space. If the space is occupied, attacker and defender play one round of "

Rock, Paper, Scissors Rock paper scissors (also known by other orderings of the three items, with "rock" sometimes being called "stone," or as Rochambeau, roshambo, or ro-sham-bo) is a hand game originating in China, usually played between two people, in which each p ...

" to determine the outcome: ;*''Attacker wins'' - The defender is removed and the attacker moves into the space. ;*''Tie'' - The defender is removed but the attacker does not move into the space. ;*''Defender wins'' - The defender is not removed and the attacker does not move into the space. The turn is wasted. Each player has a special power, depending on their coaster. The first player to teleport a counter back onto their own coaster wins.

Reviews

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Pyramid A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...

References

External links

*Looney Labs
official ''Cosmic Coasters'' homepage
*{{bgg, 1771, ''Cosmic Coasters'' Board games introduced in 2001 Science fiction board games Origins Award winners Andrew Looney games