Friday, May 15, 2009

CE alien survey #25: REINCARNATOR

First appearance: Eon Expansion #3

Plain-English power: After you lose any ships, drop your old power and get a new one.

Loved by: Cosmic fans who thrive on chaos and love to innovate.

Loathed by: Long-range strategy types. Insect and Plant should be wary of this alien power.

Three ways to win as Reincarnator:
  • A cardinal rule of Cosmic strategy is that your alien power is just a resource like any other: ships, cards, etc. Players get attached to their powers and often make irrational decisions because they're more focused on keeping their power rather than getting to 5 external colonies. You have no such sentimental attachment. You know that your current power is just a tool to get you to 5. Therefore, you are almost always going to want "combat" powers that get the challenge totals in your favor, such as Virus, Anti-Matter, Loser, or Pacifist. Lose until you get one, and then hold on to it.
  • You don't have time to mess around with indirect or subtle powers like Shadow, Gambler, Void, Hate, or Barbarian. If you get one of those, lose it — either throw a challenge as main player, or, better yet, ally with one ship with someone who's probably going to lose and is calling desperately for allies. As main player, Negotiates are your ticket to a new incarnation; do not despise them, but conserve them and use them wisely.
  • If you get a Cosmic Zap in your hand, keep it to use on youself ("self-zapulation"). Like Human, zapping yourself at the right moment can be key to the game. Unlike Human, you'll use it right after you lose a challenge and your current incarnation is Pacifist, Loser, or some other powerhouse. Your Cosmic Zap is for you, not others.
Three ways to win against Reincarnator:
  • If the Reincarnator player is not playing to get or hold a combat power, don't worry about his power. He's not using it. Just don't let him hold a combat power.
  • If he's playing strategically, then be very careful about alliances. Generally, you shouldn't do it if he doesn't have a combat power.
  • Also, if he's playing strategically, then you want to consider ganging up with the other players to remove his power by kicking him off his home planets. A smart Reincarnator is essentially playing with TWO powers.
At CE Online? Yes.

Anything else? The Wild Reincarnator is a crazy Flare, and most Cosmic. The game practically spirals into chaos as players reincarnate!

— Submitted by Rob Burns

7 comments:

TheDukester said...

I'll add my own favorite Reincarnator note: of the 75 original Eon aliens, it's one of two (possibly three) that's not an actual English word.

The other ...?

Anyone ... ? Anyone ... ? Bueller ... ?

Warpish.

There's some debate over Macron, too. It appears in some dictionaries as some sort of obscure printing thing, but I think the intention of the alien name was clearly to come up with a name that sounded BIG. So I count it as one of the three.

Anyway, this was a nice one for our halfway point. Reincarnator, in some ways, is THE classic CE alien.

Adam said...

The macron is a phonetic symbol for marking long vowels (basically a hyphen "-" over the letter). Sure, it's an obscure word, but that makes it no less of an English word. As for whether the author knew this or by coincidence made up a word that already existed, I wouldn't know, but I think the concept does apply in a way, though definitely less directly than most alien names.

Or maybe the phonetic marker is actually named after the alien!

TheDukester said...

You must be a HIT with the ladies ...

Unknown said...

Masochist really, really, really hates the Wild Flare.

Adam said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
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