All hail the cosmic octopus

🐙 Cosmoctopus is a game of tableau-building and resource gathering in a race to a singular goal: Be the first to collect 8 tentacles by proving your devotion to summon the Great Inky One! It has this playful theme, putting players in the shoes of devotees, as they collect all kinds of weird manuscripts 📖 and artifacts 🕯️ to gather knowledge of the Inky Realm, trying to invoke the great cosmic cephalopod.

It is a lightweight game for 1 to 4 players. You just play turns until someone gets their 8th tentacle, immediately winning the game. 👉Turns flow like this:
1️⃣ Move Cosmoctopus to an adjacent tile of the Inky Realm. By default this is a 3x3 grid made up of tiles with different effects, but there are other setups possible. Wherever you move the Cosmoctopus figure, that’s the effect you will activate, getting resources or drawing cards.
2️⃣ Optionally play a card, adding it to your tableau (though some cards might allow you to play another).
3️⃣ Finally, discard down to 8 resources of every type and 8 cards if you have more.

The most important aspects are definitely the cards, so let’s focus on them. 🔎 There are 4 types:
📓 Scriptures work in a similar way to cards in Splendor: if you buy them, you get an ongoing discount for certain resource types.
📒 Relics have ongoing abilities that trigger every time you do the appropriate thing.
📕 Hallucinations are powerful one-use effects
📘 Constellations are first played next to your tableau. They show a track of resources that have to be filled up in a given order. Filling up Constellations is the main way to gather tentacles.

💬 That is the gist of it. You are always influenced by where others have moved Cosmoctopus, restricting your options a bit. As your tableau grows, you will become more effective, speeding up the game as cards get cheaper and your resource collecting is accelerated. I think Paperfort Games did a great job with the aesthetics. I’m especially fond of the layout of cards and the font types used, giving the game a campy comic feel. There is even a co-operative variant in the box, in which you are all racing against a private investigator, though we haven’t tried that one yet. Looking forward to it!