In Memoriam - Jack Kittredge

Much has been written about Jack Kittredge, and having known him for about 50 years I felt like sharing my memories. He was a man of many rare talents who sadly passed away on Sunday, October 25, 2026 at age 82. I knew him from the boardgame design era of his life and his other early exploits off the beaten path of those traditional lifestyles most of us end up living. My father Peter Olotka, Bill Eberle, and Jack developed such seminal boardgames as Cosmic Encounter and Dune back in the 1970s. These titles live on today, and continue to be recognized as groundbreaking and highly influential boardgame designs.

I was lucky enough to be in the room for some of the early design and playtest sessions (and game conventions) when my father invited me to tag along. So I knew Jack both when I was a young kid and later as an adult working to keep the games alive and relevant in the current boardgame marketplace.

It’s strange when someone you’ve known your whole life dies, you can have random flashbacks of memories from decades ago. In my case at age 58 I can go up to five decades back. So hang on! Some very early design sessions happened at Jack’s house on Cedar Street in Hyannis, on Cape Cod. Being around 7 or 8 years old at the time, I’d usually gravitate to reading Jack’s old comic book collection when I got bored. I remember a lot of candles and glass beads at that house - it was a 70s thing. There were design and playtest sessions at my parent’s Cape Cod home as well, where they still live.

He used to smoke a pipe, I can still recall that evocative smell, and drove a red Toyota Land Cruiser FJ 40. I was a young car buff, fascinated by the 4 Wheel Drive badge on the back. To me that Land Cruiser represented Jack on wheels. Tough, independent, stubborn, and able navigate rough terrain, both physical and metaphysical. If you ever got into a logic argument with Jack, you’d probably lose. The DNA of his logical mind will live on forever in Cosmic Encounter, Dune, and all the other games they created many years ago.

I remember going to the land my parents, Jack, and a few other idealists bought up in Shapleigh Maine back in the 70s. Forty acres of pristine wilderness, plus a swamp with a beaver hut big enough to stand up in. They were preparing for the end of civilization, with the notion we’d all create a quasi-socialist community farm and live off the land. I believe Jack was instrumental in digging a well on the property, and building from scratch a fiberglass canoe of dubious seaworthiness (swampworthiness?). As a young boy it was a wild adventure that few kids got to live out. It’s funny to reflect back on this crew of early 30s counterculture pioneers embarking on such an adventure and realizing now that they were about 25 years younger than I am today. While the farm in Maine plan did not come to fruition, both my parents and Jack went on to respectively become organic gardeners and farmers of great distinction.

As boardgames enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the mid 2000s, Fantasy Flight Games brought Cosmic Encounter back to the marketplace in 2008. Peter, Bill, and Jack helped design and refine the reboot. I joined a few years later, as all things digital became crucial to developing and testing boardgames. Bill, Peter and I created a computer version of Cosmic in Tabletop Simulator in 2014, which continues to live, expand, and evolve thanks to the devotion of another Jack, Jack Reda who is approximately my age. Tabletop Simulator is still an invaluable “sandbox” for the endless hours of playtesting required to optimize the design of boardgames like Cosmic and Dune. Going virtual allowed us to continue developing and testing new expansion sets without the traditional constraints of distance and time. In 2015, we got Jack K to join us in this brave new digital frontier to create the 6th CE expansion set, Cosmic Eons, named in honor of their original company formed to self-publish Cosmic Encounter.

There are few people today with the fortitude, confidence, and ability to truly live life on their own terms. Bill, my father and Jack have always tried to go their own way, and it wasn’t always the easiest path traveled. It’s an attribute I respect and wonder at, all these years later. Jack truly defined and lived the life of a pioneer.

Check out the image galleries we have collected over the years, spanning game conventions in the 70s, to modern history when we met at Escape Velocity for the Cosmic Encounter Galactic Championship Tournament in 2019.

For more details about Jack’s incredible lifetime of work, family, and community please see his obituary.

My sympathies and condolences go out to the Kittredge family - his wife Julie and his four children Daniel, Paul, Ellen, and Charles.

Greg Olotka, Future Pastimes

A pictorial retrospective

Galactic Championship Tournament 2019

In 2019, we held the Cosmic Encounter Galactic Championship Tournament at the Museum of Science Fiction’s Escape Velocity in National Harbor, MD. Hosted by Charles Hildebrandt, (another lifelong Cosmic Encounter and Dune fan) we gathered together together to play tons of CE games at an elite level.

More history - the early days

The infamous Game Magazine expose

Cosmic Encounter Prototypes and Production

Future Pastime’s DUNE board game was published by Avalon Hill in 1979. DUNE was re-published (2019) by GaleForce9 to rave reviews leading to an ORIGIN AWARD in 2020, 40 years after its release! The 2nd Edition Dune just hit the shelves (or at least the website) at Barnes & Noble just in time for Christmas, 2026.

Peter Olotka, Bill Eberle and Jack Kittredge, were the principal designers of Cosmic Encounter. They formed a partnership called Future Pastimes to pursue designing games. Cosmic, which evolved from their original, “Universe Game” was created in 1972. In the 1970’s the team also formed Eon Products, Inc. to serve as a production and distribution company to publish their own line of games.

Over the decades, members of Future Pastimes went their separate ways. Peter stayed in the design business, and in the early 90s his son Greg joined him and they designed as Creative Consultants, specializing in designing science museum exhibits and programs. Bill pursued programming and database development and later brought those skills to the Cosmic Encounter Online project when he rejoined a revived Future Pastimes. Bill also brought his programming and data skills into the Creative Consultants realm of museum and sports applications. Jack Kittredge suspended his active game design career but still served as treasurer for Eon Products. Jack devoted his time to organic and sustainable farming. Jack has recently found more time to step back into the design end of things with the re-emergence of the Future Pastimes Dune game.

The newest Future Pastimes partner, Jack Reda, came into board game design via creating custom expansions for his favorite games like –you already guessed it– Cosmic Encounter. Reda has been as connected to Future Pastimes as any of the original founders. When he was 10 years old he was writing fan letters to Eon’s Encounter Magazine. And he also created The Warp database and website which catalogues hundreds of Cosmic Encounter aliens both published and fan designed “home brews”.