Cosmic Encounter & Manhattan Project

I got together with some friends last night to try out some new games he purchased. First up is Cosmic Encounter by Fantasy Flight Games. I've been wanting to try this game for a while so I was quite pleased my friend picked it up.

In this game you are a race with a set racial ability. Your objective is to settle 5 colonies on other player's planets. Every turn you have to launch 1-2 different attacks. Each player has a hand of cards with which to attack/defend and do an assortment of other functions. The game really shines in the variety of different races you can play and how they interact with each other. We ended up playing 3 games, with each game running from 1-2 hours each.

The other game we tried out was The Manhattan Project from Minion Games.

In this game your objective is to be the first player to get to a certain number of points and to do this you need to build nuclear bombs. Not use them, just build them. The basis of the game is placement of your meeples much like in Wizards of the Coast's Lords of Waterdeep game. You start out with simple labourers but you can get engineers and scientists. With these you can construct buildings like mines, universities and reactors, you can create plutonium and uranium, you can build fighters and bombers (with which you can attack the other players). But to get points you have to build plutonium and/or uranium bombs. It's not really a game for pacifists. It's a fun little game but it actually takes a while, there was 3 of us playing and it took a good 2 hours.