Well, I was just saying this because I remembered my first "game" of Cosmic Encounter.
It was with our usual gaming group and we had played lots of euros up to that point.
So we were all going in with the idea that it was as regular a game as we had played before.
We would look at the cards in our hand and the powers and tried to play them instead of the players.
How wrong we were. The cards and powers don't matter at all! Okay, they do a, but the main focus of the game is on the players and not the materials.