Cosmic Frog Board Game Review

Year Published: 2020

Players: 2-6

Playing Time: 45-90 Minutes

This one hurts. Cosmic Frog was my most anticipated game of 2022 (yes, it came out in 2020; I am slow to catchup to releases). The batshit theme, crazy artwork, and premise all seemed to speak directly to my preferences as a gamer, one who enjoys hijinks and chaos and caprice rolled into furiously interactive environments.

It seemed fresh, even if it was clearly borrowing a hodge-podge of ideas from earlier titles, such as the excellent classic Cosmic Encounter. And designer Jenna Felli has a bunch of indie design cred from people whose opinions I respect.

Cosmic Frog is a…how to describe it? You’re playing as two-mile tall, multidimensional frogs who are swallowing bits of a broken planet to please your ethereal masters, hoping to piece it back together again. To do this, you’ll be warring with other frogs with the same goals, and have random events and crazy powers bouncing off of one another as you try to accomplish this.

The game didn’t seem to care about balance, at least not in a mechanical sense. Instead, it asked players to provide the balance through play. And the randomness of various elements promised to provide a furious maelstrom of shifting considerations for players. I was pumped to play.

What followed was, to put it as delicately as possible, a profound letdown.

Anatomy of a Letdown – Preparation

Step one is learning the damn thing. For something that seems like intergalactic bumper cars, I want to throw myself right in…

…instead, it proved to be one of the more frustrating and meandering rulebooks I’ve ever read, which is saying something. Look, if the spirit of your game is unbridled chaos, it still pays to have some tough love from a good editor who can streamline the teach. The play itself should be chaotic, but the preamble shouldn’t follow suit.

Then one of the longer setups I’ve had to get through, owing to the specificity of dozens of little bits. Are there worse setup times in board gaming? Yes. But pointing to them to excuse Cosmic Frog would be the same “what about-ism” that plagues disingenuous political discourse on social media.

If I’m playing with new players, the Teach + Setup is daunting enough that it will prevent me from playing it (or even bringing it in the first place) to many meetups.

Part II – Gameplay

Cosmic Frog does not want you to feel secure, and it layers randomness on top of itself in order to provide this paranoia. Again, this is awesome in theory.

There’s an Ameritrash-style mentality that has to be adopted in order to enjoy this sort of capriciousness. Reveling in the bad beats is a prerequisite to enjoyment. I’d like to think I have a fair amount of it, given many of my favorites.

But it didn’t code for me as enjoyment in this one, not in the same way that many others do that can be equally brutal in a technical sense.

Because let’s tick off some boxes of its randomness:

• Random turn order
• Random frog powers, that randomly mutate at random points
• (Semi) random dice rolls dictating combat outcomes
• Random cataclysmic strikes at the board – both at (semi)random points and random times – that will punt random frogs into the void and/or cause them to lose resources.

…and you get the idea. The problem, though, is that in layering so many types of randomness on top of one another, the game often feels pointlessly random.

I like feeling as though I have to war against a game that doesn’t care about my plans. That’s incredible. Take Dune, for instance. The uncaring world of Arrakis is basically the game’s silent, 7th player. But I dislike when I feel almost nothing except the buffeting winds of those fates on my decisions, invalidating most of them even as they’re made.

It’s the difference between trying to fly a kite on a really windy day and in a hurricane. One is challenging and potentially rewarding. The other is just you being murdered by a hurricane, your kite and body a tattered mess at the bottom of some ocean basin.

Take, for example, turn order. I’ve seen players wait 20 minutes for a turn due to the caprice of the deck. Which is both boring and, let’s be honest, they’ll have nothing left by the time it’s their turn again. It’s fine if you know to expect this going into the game, but is it ever fun when it happens? Or the random powers that you may not even have a chance to use before being given another. I want a chance to carve out an identity at the board with my frog, and these powers help to do so. But their ephemeral nature lends itself instead to indifference at their existence, not excitement. Rather than playing to your strengths, you just sort of do stuff and hope that your special ability coincides with what you’re doing at any given point.

The bone I’ll throw it is that I did not play the partners/team variant of the game before this review, and I think that play mode could sand off some of the more arbitrary edges of the game and turn it into something where the chaos is balanced with enough control to feel emotionally invested in the outcome. If I’m to play it again, I’ll suggest that play mode, and will report back if I find it to be more to my liking. But I’m also not sure it would be more than a marginal improvement.

Part III – Endgame

Endgame is worse somehow. Not because the gameplay changes, but because it shrinks. So unless you get a sudden, early end via one of the game’s random mechanisms, you’ll be left on a dwindling and largely barren chunk of rock and space. And the only thing left to do will be to punch frogs in the gullet, hoping to steal land tiles from them.

And then you’ll do that again, and again, and so will others, because it’s the only viable decision left. And everyone’s just sort of hoping the dice smile on them more often than anyone else, to grab enough land tiles for the win. There’s no strategy at this point whatsoever, just the impending doom of the game’s equally copious teardown and hoping you’re a bit luckier in turn order and dice rolling.

It never felt tense or climactic in these moments. It was just a bit sad, like the last drunks left at a house party, their performative shenanigans playing to an empty room and a host who’s already cleaning up the empty beer bottles from the counters.

Cosmic Frog – Conclusions

I’ve seen this one showered in praise by a few people whose opinions I greatly respect. In this, though, I have to believe it’s at least in part because they’re seeing Cosmic Frog for the unique statement it seems to want to make, but not the type of experience it’s most likely to produce at the table.

Give me King of Tokyo or Cosmic Encounter or Wiz-War instead. Cosmic Frog seems to be in their spiritual lineage, or wants to be. Those games channel the brutal, hilarious chaos that I want to love about Cosmic Frog, but their execution doesn’t frustrate me nearly as much, and they are all easier to teach and setup and play with wider varieties of gamers.

Novelty is interesting to us, and this game has a ton of it. Jenna Felli is among the hobby’s most unique and interesting designers, and I say that without a hint of sarcasm! We need more experimenting in such strange ways.

But that doesn’t mean the experiment will always work.

Further, the theme and art are spectacular. Give me more of this, please! Not just frogs in space, but ridiculously creative themes in general. I can’t say enough about how much I want more of this.

Which makes my overall sentiment on the game that much more heartbreaking. If you’re in the opposite camp on this game, as many seem to be, I wish you nothing but love and joy as you play it. But I sadly won’t be joining you in that exuberance.