FrontPage - Seattle Cosmic Wiki

Random Seattle Cosmic quote of the moment:

"It only has about 15 minutes of rules,max." --Kisa Griffin, ?SeattleCosmicGameNight20040821

Seattle Cosmic Game Night

Every Saturday in the Seattle area, a small cadre of more-or-less highly trained gamers meets to do battle. The site of these epic (or at least epicish) battles rotates among Mill Creek, Seattle, Tacoma, and ?Tukwila.

We are primarily interested in GermanStyleGames, although our tastes range through other table games of skill and strategy, including vintage board games; chess variants; classic and new card games; piecepack, Icehouse, and similar GameSystems; and a lot more. A few of us even dare the occasional PartyGame. Every so often, some of us even play Cosmic Encounter, our namesake game. To get a more comprehensive concept, browse this list of GamesWePlay. For a look at our playing style and the way we do things, see the SeattleCosmicGuidelines.

If you live in the Seattle area, you can see a schedule for the current quarter on the CurrentSchedule page, although according to current group policy you'll need to be invited by a member as a guest to get directions to host homes.

Newsletters / Session Reports

Our newsletters are posted publicly on the web, most with photos of the games. New ones are usually posted early in the week after each game night. The newsletters include reviews and photos of games we've played, links to buy some of the games, and more. Since this is a WikiWikiWeb, you can help write the newsletters yourself!

Pages of General Interest

ComicEncounter: A page of the best gaming humour. Worth visiting if you like to both game and laugh.

Desert Island Games: What five games would you bring to a desert island? Some Seattle Cosmic members have made their lists available.

EmergencyGameKit: The games that some Seattle Cosmic members take with them everywhere.

GameLibrary: Seattle Cosmic has assembled a lending library of games and game-related books.

GamesToTheRescue is a philanthropic project of the Center for Ludic Synergy and Seattle Cosmic Game Night. The aim of the project is to provide game equipment and a book of game rules to hospitals, for use by patients and visitors.

GamingNews: What's new in the gaming hobby? Visit the page to learn how to post press releases.

LanguageBuddies: A page for Seattle Cosmic members who want to team up to learn other languages so they can translate game rules.

OnlineGames: Games you can play online, some alone, some against human opponents. One of the most complete lists available.

PiecepackGear: Although Seattle Cosmic is not selling any, we can facilitate your purchase of nifty apparel embroidered with the wifty piecepack logo.

The Unofficial Orion Home Page commemorates a lost classic GameSystem -- it's been one of Seattle Cosmic's most-played and most requested games.

Board Game Geek: One of the premiere sites on the web with listings of games, postings of rules translations, reviews, things to buy and sell, etc.

Downloads

Check out the PDF file of the Bad Powers we had available on Cheesy Cosmic Night 2000. See the Cheesy Cosmic Night 2000 newsletter for details.

We are now making available a collection of powers, Flares, Edicts, and other expansions for Cosmic Encounter. Most of them have text taken from those fine sites The Warp and Aaron Fuegi's CE page, but for the most part, you won't find these files in PostScript and PDF formats as they are here at Seattle Cosmic, printable (and usually proofread)! The files don't have an index page yet, and there are no instructions. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader or a workalike such as xpdf to read and print the PDF files, or you can send the PostScript files directly to a PostScript printer.

About the Seattle Cosmic Wiki

The Seattle Cosmic Wiki is a collaborative hypertext environment for the Seattle Cosmic Game Night group and interested others, emphasising easy modification of information. Really easy. Amazingly enough, you can edit any page just by clicking the EditText link at the bottom. Capitalized words joined together form a WikiName, which hyperlinks to another page. The highlighted title at the top searches for all pages that link to the current page. Pages that do not yet exist are linked with a question mark: just follow the link and you can flesh out the page. This wiki can also link to InterWiki space.

One of the main ideas for starting a Seattle Cosmic Wiki was to make the weekly newsletters more collaborative and complete. Instead of glossing over games Ron Hale-Evans didn't play, people who did play that game can now report on the game, what happened, opinions about the game itself, and so on. Also, newsletters are more timely, since it isn't completely incumbent on Ron to finish writing them up.

The Seattle Cosmic Wiki is based on MoinMoin, which is a Python WikiClone, based on PikiPiki. "Moin moin!" is a common German slang expression explained (sort of) on the MoinMoinEtymology page. To learn more about what a WikiWikiWeb is, read about WhyWikiWorks and the WikiNature. Also, consult the WikiWikiWebFaq.

Finally, we highly recommend you read WikiSocialNorms. Please, play nice -- isn't that what game nights are all about?

Thanks to John Braley, who suggested using a Wiki, and pointed Ron toward a MoinMoin as a good starting point. As far as we know, Seattle Cosmic is the first game night with its own Wiki. It is also the avowed inspiration for the Board Game Wiki at BoardgameGeek.

Interesting starting points:

RecentChanges: see where people are currently working
WantedPages: BLANK pages that are CRYING OUT for JUICY CONTENT
HelpForBeginners: to get you going
WikiSandBox: feel free to change this page and experiment with editing
FindPage: search or browse the database in various ways

Supporting Seattle Cosmic

The Center for Ludic Synergy and Seattle Cosmic Game Night are now associates of Funagain Games. This means that 5% of your purchase there goes toward supporting and our project GamesToTheRescue if you buy games via our Funagain links. Even if you don't want to buy the games, the Funagain pages usually contain lengthy, useful game reviews.