It looks like those grave robbing tomb raiders over at Fantasy Flight Games have beaten me down to the Game Crypt this month and the fruit of their vandalism, announced at Gen Con, is that they have been granted license to reprint three of most sought after out-of-print games in the board gaming hobby. And it just so happens that these three games, published by a design collective known as Eon (Bill Eberle, Peter Olotka, Bill Norton, and Jack Kitteredge) are three of the absolute best games that the hobby has to offer, three games that are pretty much the Elvis, Beatles, and Rolling Stones of modern board game design influencing everything from PC games to Magic: The Gathering and offering timeless, exciting, and brilliant gameplay even in the face of almost thirty years of development and changing trends since their original publications.

eBay, the occasional lucky thrift store find, or price-gouging Internet retailers have been the only access many gamers have had to experience the amazing games of Eon for far too long and the announcement is definitely a boon to those of us who weren’t around for these games when they were published. Consider this a very advanced preview for these titles since FFG hasn’t released any particulars, specifics, or schedules regarding these reprints and given their very busy release schedule (which includes a movie, ferchrissakes!) there’s no telling when we’ll see them on store shelves. If you haven’t played these classic games, get ready to be blown away by the best design team ever to work in the hobby. I’m not kidding.

These games- seminal classics all- are Borderlands, Cosmic Encounter, and the greatest board game ever published: Dune. I deeply love all three games and if I had to pick out ten games to take down in the bomb shelter three spots would likely be reserved for these titles. All three games have an interesting sense of connectivity—it’s not hard to spot how each game features similar concepts and how mechanics are repeated but iterated in different and dynamic ways. All three games are highly interactive, heavily themed, and tremendously efficient designs that focus as much on player psychology and diplomacy as on nuts-and-bolts mechanics. Throughout each game, there is clearly a sense of authorship much in the same way that we can detect an auteur’s hand in a Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux game. Even after playing hundreds and hundreds of games of all descriptions, I’ve never played anything that has that Eon feel. You’ll know it when you play it.

Cosmic Encounter was EON’s first release way back in 1977 and it isn’t hard to see why the major game manufacturers at the time weren’t interested in it. It was a very radical concept for the time that features a lot of elements that we take for granted in both electronic and board games— specifically, the idea hinged on each player taking on the role of a different alien bent on galactic conquest, each with a special ability that breaks the fundamental rules of the game in some way. The game itself is amazingly simple: each player has a home system with several planets and handful of ships. Each turn, an edict is revealed to the acting player indicating which system he or she must attack. The player gathers up some ships and selects a planet in that system to attempt to invade. Now, here’s where it gets tricky. The other players can join either side and there are incentives to be on the winning team particularly if you assist the invader since you’ll get to drop a colony down on the planet as well and be one step closer to winning the game. Once the alliances of convenience are settled, each player plays a card that either has a wildly varying number or special text ability. The highest number, counting total ship strength and the card value, wins. Usually.

What strikes me the most about Cosmic Encounter is how intrinsically tied to human interaction the game is, beyond its groundbreaking mechanics and accessible rules and I believe it’s one of the key points that make Eon’s games so special. These guys’ idea of fun was never a group of people sitting around trying to figure out the most efficient way to follow the rules to accumulate victory points as in many “modern” board game designs. Their idea of fun was talking, wheedling, intimidating, threatening, lying, bartering, and kibbutzing your way into alliances of convenience; a trait borne out by the consistent option for allied victories in most of their games. It’s interesting to note that the first few games of Cosmic Encounter that I played were terrible, but it was because I was playing with a terrible group that just didn’t get what the game was all about, that it was all about taking advantage of other players as much as your special ability and your hand of cards. With the right group, Cosmic Encounter can be a hilarious and often harrowing look at player personalities, whether assumed as part of the game or not.

Cosmic Encounter went through some nine expansions in its original incarnation which added tons of extra aliens with their attendant special powers along with planetary moons, a money system, and a horde of other extra features. And there’s an untold number of homebrew variants, expansions, and aliens on the Internet so the total of this is that it’s infinitely replayable, always a unique experience, and mind bogglingly complex despite simple rules and a 45-60 minute playtime (at least with four players). Over the years there have been a number of reprints including an ill-fated 2000 update from Avalon Hill that produced a solid and very attractive base game but no expansions. Additionally, if you just can’t stand to leave the keyboard, Peter Olotka still runs a Cosmic Encounter online game service that offers a pretty good electronic rendition of this classic. Of course, it’s no substitute for the intricacies and delicacies of face-to-face diplomacy, negotiation, and outright begging.

Dune, published by Avalon Hill in 1979, was their second title, and I’ll defend to the death my assertion that it is in fact the best board game ever published. Of course, it’s based on the Frank Herbert novels (at least the first two) and there is, to this date, no game published that presents a better case for deriving mechanics, rules, and game procedures directly from its theme material. The integration of theme and mechanics is truly astonishing- even the environmental themes of the novel exploring man’s interaction with and exploitation of nature are explicitly represented in the gameplay. Taking the idea of Cosmic Encounter even further, the players represent each major faction from the novels and each has a few rule-breaking (or exploiting) special abilities that make all six sides a completely unique experience to play as they vie for control of the five strongholds located on Arrakis. Also drawing on Cosmic Encounter is the impetus for alliance and an even more pronounced effect of combining powers for greater effect. The powers are hugely influential to the outcome of the game; the Bene Gesserit can use “The Voice” to command a player to play a certain card, the Spacing Guild pockets the income from all travel to the planet surface, and the Harkonnen player enjoys several traitorous, villainous abilities that speak to the faction’s treacherous and lecherous character. It all stops just short of role-playing, so no need to don the fish man outfit or the fat suit.

Dune is more complex than Cosmic Encounter but with a scant eight pages of rules the only real difficulty in learning to play is in learning to play well. Each turn, Spice randomly appears in a region on Arrakis. The players bid on Treachery cards, which could be weapons, defenses, or even useless cards. There’s a storm that sweeps the circular map and wipes out any forces in open desert. Players send forces down to Arrakis from a limited pool and can engage in combat (which is handled with these amazing “Combat Wheels” and some simple card play- no dice). Troops still standing on a Spice blow get to harvest it, and of course the game’s economy is completely based around Spice. The Spice must flow. Oh, and of course there are Sandworms— they pop up and swallow everything in the space where the last Spice blow occurred.

That simple description barely does the game justice and really it’s just an outline of something much, much larger. Dune is very much an experience; there are subtleties and details that really have to be played to be appreciated yet the game is completely accessible to even the most inexperienced gamer thanks to simple, logical rules.