Cosmic Frog

Cosmic Frog begins where most games stop out of embarrassment: each player controls an immortal, invulnerable, frog-like giant two miles tall, harvesting land from the Shards of Aeth to help rebuild a shattered world. You are not a medieval noble with a warehouse. You are a greedy frog eating mountains and deciding who to hit next. Marvellous.

At its centre, you gather terrain from the Shards and carry it towards scoring, but that job does not stay peaceful for long. There are dice, fights, complication, and asymmetric powers that can become gloriously unruly; you build up your haul, and somebody else spots a very good reason to make it their business.

Scoring is not merely where the racket ends, which is the clever bit. Its logic keeps the game moving, so grabbing land, throwing punches, and protecting what you have collected all feed the same deranged enterprise. With five players, the table had precisely the right level of disorder: one person was collecting mountains, while another arrived to explain that mountains have no owners.

It first looks baggy and overblown, but there is enough care underneath that the chaos is not random. The base game can land heavily on a new group during the teach, yet once everyone has found the rhythm, this frog karate has teeth and a point. It is an honest, oddly substantial choice for anyone who wants the sort of game where you will inconvenience your friends and enjoy every minute of it.

Updated session

The later play confirmed the first impression, while making the weight of the entry clearer. Find Muck did not make it onto the table because the base game was already demanding enough for a new group. Its psionic powers add a fair amount of extra meat, but they need players who already have some sense of the base game; this is not the right first bite.