Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Cudgel strikes a blow for homebrews everywhere

Fantasy Flight Games recently unveiled the new Cudgel alien for the upcoming Cosmic Encounter boardgame, making it the first true homebrewed alien creation to be featured as part of the new game. You can check out what Cudgel is all about right here.

A number of aliens have been featured at FFG.com as the build-up to the new edition of CE continues, but none have been what I would consider true homebrews. Tripler will be new to many players, but he's been played about 25,000 times at Cosmic Encounter Online. Human is new, too, but I never published the idea anywhere for anyone else to see (not to mention that the original idea was later modified), so no one ever got a chance to play it for themselves. Remora is new, but I don't think CE designer Kevin Wilson would argue too hard that his alien creation would qualify as a homebrew.

So congratulations to Cudgel and creator Ken Hubbard. It's no longer a homebrew; it's an official alien!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel happy for him but it really seems like this new alien is overpowered compared to most.

TheDukester said...

Anonymous posting -- ick.

I hope there's not too much more of this. I hate having to limit access to comments or forcing users to answer a CAPTCHA or whatever.

But, seriously -- ick. Especially when being critical. Have the guts to back up your words.

Anonymous said...

Hey... for some reason this site is not blocked today. Cool! Nice blog.

Thanks for the congratulations. I'm very happy that it was picked to go in the new set. I'd like to offer a big thanks to Kevin Wilson, Peter Olatka, and whoever else was responsible for getting it in. Big thanks to Jack Reda also, because without him and his site, Cudgel never would have been submitted to FFG in the first place. As it turned out, FFG used it almost exactly word-for-word as I submitted, with a couple minor rewordings since I haven't learned to speak "Modern CE" yet. They'll always be tokens to me....

One thing about the history of this power: when I posted it on the old rec.games list a few years back, both Jack and Gerald Katz commented that Jack had already created the same power, known as Weapon. So I was not the first to think of it (not surprising, since it's very basic). It's interesting that both independent concepts for this ability resulted in a weapon for the name. (However, I have never seen the original Weapon. The Warp no longer has it, apparently.)

As far as it being over-powered, it's not even close if you ask me. Check Duke's recent rankings of all the aliens. (Sorry, don't have the link.) Both Void and Bully ranked in the BOTTOM 20 percent of all powers. Cudgel is very similar to them. Cool, aggressive, scary, sounds dangerous... but makes people play their biggest cards on you. You can't use the power unless you win the challenge, and when you do win, your power helps everybody else as much as it helps you.

TheDukester said...

Ken, first off, I'm glad you're no longer blocked. That's weird ... maybe I've used a bad word somewhere that was flagged by some sort of filter?

Anyway, just as an FYI, Cudgel pretty much stood up on its own merits. I had a LOT of alien-power conversations with Kevin W. during development, and he pretty much always liked Cudgel. I do believe that it was initially included on the second list of aliens ... don't feel bad, though, as MANY aliens from the very first list were either removed or significantly altered. And it survived every "cut" after that.

Congrats, again -- you're official!

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