Every once in while, I'll be in a long game of Cosmic Encounter, and someone needs to leave.  I've always managed to keep the player, but is it possible to keep playing as long as the number of players is at three or more?  What would need to be done?

Think this through with me.

If a player leaves:

Yell at the player and tell him or her never to come back (optional).

Shuffle all of his or her cards back in to the appropriate decks.

Remove all of his or her ships from the game unless they are being used by another player.

Remove his or her score marker.

Remove his or her planets which do not have foreign ships.

Remove any tokens the player had in play.

Now, this is where it gets strange.  I was thinking that the lost player's destiny cards should be removed.  If a player draws his own color, and has a colony on the lost player's world with another player present, he or she may attack another colony on that planet to remove it.  I think that this action should be possible since if the lost player were still there, the possibility exists.  The only other option is to leave those planets alone, but that could give certain players an unfair advantage since those colonies would be untouchable.  

Another, easier alternative would be to just end the game with the current score standing.

What do you think?  Is it possible?

This has never happened to me, but here's what I'd do:

1) Discard the player's hand.

2) Remove all that player's ships from the game.

3) Leave the player's planets in place, so that existing foreign colonies continue to count.

4) Redraw any time that player's color comes up in Destiny.

I like it, but I would alter Jefferson's #4 as follows:

4) When any player draws the lost player's color for destiny, he must either (a) have an encounter against any other player's foreign colony in that system or (b) draw again.

Kobold Curry Chef said:

I wonder if this will work.  I definitely agree with 1 and 3.  #2 might be tricky depending on races in play such as Locust or Fungus.

For 4, shouldn't the lost player's cards be removed from the Destiny Deck?

If anyone tries this out, let me know how it goes!

Just_a_Bill said:

What is the reasoning behind this?  Is it because existing foreign colonies there are safe?

GrimJester said:

Same effect.  This just saves having to stop, sort through the Destiny cards, and reshuffle them.  Some groups just leave all the colors in the Destiny deck all the time, and skip past the unused ones during play.

Bill's suggestion of letting people attack "leftover" foreign colonies instead makes sense to me.  Most people will opt to redraw, I'm sure, but there are times when you want the option of knocking out somebody's foreign colony.

My theory with that suggestion was as follows: The one consistent way you can always lose a foreign colony is if the system owner draws his own color and chooses to encounter you there.  If a player drops out of the game, then the foreign colonies in that player's system would be "safe" (or at least somewhat safer than all the others).  This suggestion was simply to preserve the mechanism that, on rare occasion, your foreign colony can be challenged.

As for how to handle the premature departure of a player, my approach would be to remove whatever components in that player's color are no longer "relevant" at the first convenient opportunity to do so:

• Discard his hand, along with any cards stacked on his alien sheet and any "dead" cards in play such as citadels or cards "set aside" by a flare for later recovery by the departed player.  (I don't see any need to immediately re-shuffle the deck.  My goal is to keep the game moving.)
• Immediately remove from the game his ships that have no bearing on other players' powers or game effects.
• Leave in play whichever of his ships are "relevant", such as those in fungoid stacks. These ships will later be removed whenever they cease to be relevant. For example, when a non-super fungoid stack hits the warp, the departed player's stacked ships leave the game at that moment.
• Leave all of his planets on the table as long as any of them contains a foreign colony.  When you draw his color, you may either re-draw destiny or encounter another player's foreign colony in that system.
• Leave his color cards in the destiny deck as long as there are foreign colonies to encounter in that system.  If the last such colony is lost, then as those "dead" cards get drawn simply remove them from the game and draw a replacement (this would not count as a destiny draw for game effects that trigger on each draw).
• Move his colony marker to the zero notch to commemorate his great misfortune in having to leave early.