Cosmic Frog is a game of collection,
combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a
two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists
solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments
of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands
from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are
their terrain harvesters.
At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the
cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once
on the Shard, you harvest land and store it in your massive gullet. When
your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge
your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent
storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your
frogs' collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the
First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of
their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do
this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both
maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.
Throughout the game, you're free to keep to yourself and focus on
harvesting at your own pace...or you may attack other frogs and try to
take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog's
vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked
into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.
But don't ever get too comfortable with your carefully crafted plans as the Aether is a chaotic and unstable place. Waves of Aether Flux will prompt you to mutate, and you may have to change your strategy in accordance with your new powers. And Splinters of Aeth,
tiny slivers of the old world that swirl madly about in the Aether,
will periodically fall from their orbit and crash into the Shard,
destroying large areas of terrain and blasting apart the very Shard
itself!
The game ends when the Shard is stripped of all harvestable land or
when a Splinter shatters it. When the game ends, the player with the
highest valued vault wins, and the frogs move to the next Shard to
gather more land for the First Ones...
