Cosmic Frog

Cosmic Frog is a great time that features fun moment to moment gameplay and a very unique theme. This is the only game where you can hop through dimensions as a 2 mile tall, immortal, psychedelic frog. I love it!

Amazing art and theme

Beautiful game. Great art, nice minis, and a cool neoprene board to play on. Happy to have this one.

This is a fantastic game in both looks and play

If you know the type of game Cosmic Frog is you can have lots of fun. It's a psychedelic journey that has some strategy, cool mechanisms, and some conflicts. Even though I consider myself an euro player, I really liked this game. Might not be for everyone though. Overall, a great game.

Cosmic Frog - A 2-6 player game with a Ricky Royal solo variant where you play as gigantic immortal frogs to harvest and disgorge land to your vault, and attack and raid other frogs for their lands. Positive Categories: Component Quality - 4/5 - The components in this game are superb outside of the following 3 quality control issues with my copy. They are small enough for me to gloss over them. One of my Oomph crystals has some extra plastic not cut off completely. There's a part of my playmat that has some extra stitching sticking out (easily solved myself). Finally, Some of the frog miniatures and color standees don't fit very tight on each other. If quality control is better, this would be a 5/5 for component quality. The SUPER THICK highland tiles are amazing, the Oomph crystals are chunky and nice to look at and handle, and playmats are always nice. Artwork - 5/5 - Note this is very much my own opinion. Whether or not the art interests you is up to the reader. I love the box art, and the rest of the art on the frog abilities match if not exceed the quality of the box art. Other components are satisfactory as well, I have no issues with the 100+ hexagonal land and barren tiles. They are easily distinguishable, the player aid helps with this, and the backside of each tile is also labeled with their names (only used for scoring variant). Learning - 4/5 - Pretty easy to learn. There is a sample gameplay at the end of the rulebook. There is a bit of confusion with 1 particular frog ability that I'm waiting on clarification on, but other than that, once you get through the 15-20 minute teach, the players pick up the game quickly because all you are only doing is one action per turn, maybe 2 if you use some Oomph (actual name of a resource in the game). Interaction - 5/5 - Players should know going in that there is direct combat with other players. If you aren't ready to punch your friends into the outer dimensions and have them punch you back once they return to dimension zero, this game will fall flat. I have played this several times, with different players, and when you have friends that are constantly eyeing up your gullet and vault, this game really shines. This is my favorite game if I want direct conflict between players. Replayability - 4/5 - The random setup of land tiles is the main source of randomness. I would like it if there were more frog abilities (expansion please!!!). Throughout a normal length game (length of game determined by players during setup), you may stumble across the same frog ability multiple times via Aether Flux Action Card. Negative Categories: Cost/Price - 5/5 MSRP at $79.99, but available for cheaper. On the more expensive side for games. That being said, the component quality justifies the price. You 100% get what you pay for. Very happy with the production quality. Downtime - 2/5 Due to variable turn order in the same fashion as Cosmic Encounter, downtime could range anywhere from 0 to several turns. Since each turn doesn't take that long, I think it averages to maybe 2 minutes max between turns, possibly 3 minutes if there are lots of combat actions. Neutral Categories: Theme - 5/5 - The mechanisms in this game with such an absurd theme somehow match up seamlessly. The mechanisms and the wacky theme just make sense together. When you harvest land, they enter and fall to the bottom of your gullet. When you disgorge the last land you harvested gets disgorged out of your gullet first. When you harvest a land but your gullet is full, the land at the bottom of your gullet gets destroyed by the small star powering your frog (you poop it out). When you want to leap further, you just spend some Oomph to increase your leap distance. When your frog gets punched and crashes into the Shard, your massive size causes the top tile that you landed on to be destroyed. These are just some of the fantastic thematic tie-ins with the mechanisms. I don't know how Jim Felli does it. I am baffled by how well the out-of-this-world theme integrates into the game. Luck - 4/5 - There is constant silliness due to the many types of randomness in the game. There is the randomized turn order; combat and raiding are resolved by die rolls, but can be buffed by just using some more Oomph. Random cards drawn for splinter strikes and abilities drawn from aether flux cards mean you must always be reacting to new information. That being said, this game isn't all luck. There is a lot of strategy involved in planning how to disgorge into your vault. Scoring is a little similar to Azul where you get bonuses for straight lines (but this is hexagonal, and also applies to diagonals). However, Cosmic Frog brings a three-dimensional aspect to it as well. Other reviews also seem to agree the placing and scoring of a vault could be an individual game in itself. Not only that, but you can forego a bit of scoring to set up a Siphon in your vault which allows you to regenerate Oomph at the start of each of your turns. How do you balance building a Siphon for Oomph generation and creating lines of same lands to score more points? Game Length - 3/5 - You can expect the game to take about 2 hours for the first game, including setup and teaching. Since I've had to teach every time I've played this game (new players every time), I can't say for sure how much faster the game will go if all players already know how to play the game. As an educated guess, I would believe the box stated 45-90 minutes if you don't include teach and setup. For what it's worth, you can change the setup to add more or less fracture tiles for a shorter or longer game, respectively. Miscellaneous Notes - Setup for this game will take a while. You have to lay out 84 hex tiles on the playmat, then depending on the number of frogs in play, some more lowlands and highlands tiles on top of the 84 barren tiles. Naturally, with more players, the faster this setup becomes. But, it is quite annoying if you also have to teach the game. Conclusion - I have played this game solo with Ricky Royal's solo variant, at 2 players (2 frogs vs 2 frogs team battle), and at 4 players. This game certainly plays better with more players. Overall, I rate Cosmic Frog 9/10 and has become my 5th favorite game.