It sounds like there's a few hardcore cosmic fans who may have forgotten the full history of Cosmic. Eon did NOT sell to Mayfair. They were bought out by Milton Bradley, who, like Hasbro, got back to the roots and re-released the basic set only. After years of nearly zero sales, an Eon marketing rep came out in 'Encounters' magazine, attempting to explain. When Eon released Cosmic, they had only marginal sales. As they released expansion sets, they found that they sold more expansions than original sets, followed by a coordinated burst in basic set sales, then previous expansion sets. The result: each expansion set increased the market base noticably.

When Milton Bradley released their version of the basic set, they decided to wait until sales showed a marked popularity of the game (at least to the levels Eon enjoyed). Naturally, without expansions, they never saw it. So, we had to wait years before Mayfair got the rights to re-release the game. Mayfair vowed to stick to the original tenants and style of the Eon game, and did a pretty good job of smoothing out many of the difficulties found in the original. But most of all, they did their best to issue as much of the original game as possible, and even came up with new powers in the expansion.

I haven't seen a better looking verson of the game than it's current form. But I urge Hasbro and Avalon Hill to take the lesson of MB to heart: Please concider this version of the game it's beginning, not the end. Based on your current design, I can see that you've planned for an 8 person game, or at least 6. So, at some point, you've got an expansion in mind. You don't need to hit us with over 100 powers right away, especially if you can come up with 75 or 80 that really work well together and keep game fairness high. I'd rather have a 6-player, 6 power [down] game with powers that don't have conflicts.

Keep the Mayfair advancements faithful (like the boarder around the flare cards to make them easy to separate back out of the deck between games), and come up with new ideas of your own (by playing the game yourselves). Moons and Lucre were fun additions, but a lot of people didn't play with them (especially when introducing new people) so keep those separated. And if possible, please, realize the promise made by Eon years ago and release 'technology' in a future expansion.

If you need help, there are 100s of die-hard fans out there to tap. Just put up a BBS and fire questions at us.