Cosmic Encounter Online: yes, that Cosmic Encounter.

This game was one of my favorites, back in the day, partly because the rules forced direct social negotiation to be the basis of play. It was hilarious. The game bears some relationship to Magic, in that you gain and lose gaming capability (“powers”) that affect gameplay via cards (at least in the offline version).

What made it fun, in my opinion, is that the effects and strengths of the powers were very vaguely, linguistically defined, and so everyone in the game had to negotiate the limits and effects of the powers, each time they were deployed. Which led to much bribing, yelling, plotting, stealing, and all the other sorts of things we speaking monkeys do for fun in the off-season.

I have no idea where I got my copy of the game. Did I inherit it from Eric Sinclair? I don’t think so, but maybe.