Bad Moon Rising
Welcome to the future citizen!
Here on the Moon you’ll enjoy fresh vegetables straight from our agri-domes. Everyone will have a job in one of our science facilities or mines. You’ll meet people from all over the Earth, all over the Moon! For the ultimate in comfort and convenience we provide robots to help with day-to-day tasks, from helping at work to making dinner at home. No need to worry about those malfunctions that have plagued previous colonies. Our robots are 100% safe!*
*Please read your contract for actual safety percentages.
If you read that in the style of a 1950s announcer you are very much in the fight frame of mind. Moon Colony Bloodbath is designed by Donald K. Vaccarino, the man who brought us the classic Dominion a game that literally defined a whole genre. The art is by Franz Vohwinkle and evokes the hopeful, retro-futuristic vibe of sci-fi of this era of speculative fiction.
Let’s start with the art, because it contains probably my biggest criticism of the game. The art is mostly excellent, evoking the covers of sci-fi writing from this period all bubble headed space suits, and clunky looking robots. Each player gets a scientist themed player board at the start of the game and some perk cards associated with that scientist. These are not asymmetric, but just for identification purposes for when those cards come up. Given their almost zero gameplay impact, you then have to ask yourself what on earth they were thinking with Dr. Dibson
This seems incredibly racist to me, and it feels like a thoughtless piece of execution to the extent where you wonder if it was AI generated. An absolutely dunderheaded piece of art direction.
That out of the way, let’s take a look at how you actually build a moon base. First you need some buildings, spending some of your hard earned megabucks, that’s how I thought of them, on construction. Each of these buildings provides a variety of bonuses including to the actions you can take. When you can take those actions, well there is the crux of our puzzle.
At the core of Moon Colony Bloodbath is a deck of cards called the Progress Deck. Every turn one of these cards is turned over and affects everyone around the table (mostly). At the start of the game there are four cards in this deck called Work, and they let you take an action. This could be gathering money, producing food, drawing new blueprints, building those blueprints, or gathering mysterious boxes (we will come back to them).
As you build an engine grows. Maybe you’ll start to be able to get food every time you mine. Want more blueprint options, there are buildings for that. Get some mines going to make even more money every time you choose that route. Maybe you’ll get more people every time you draw blueprints. There are lots of options to build your engine and all of them evoke the picture of the sort of place you are building be that agrarian paradise or mine wrought hell hole.
What of the rest of the Progress Deck? Well there are two twists in it that do all sorts of strange things to the flow of the game. You need to keep them in mind as cards rumble on. Maybe you’ll get a sudden injection of cash, or more food based on the number of buildings you have, or an opportunity to build out of turn. Although there are only two of them in the deck these twists really change how each game of Moon Colony Bloodbath plays.
The other two cards in the starting Progress Deck are trouble, literally. These two cards pull in Events to the Progress deck and all of these will disrupt your plans. The events are in a sequence so they always get added to the deck in a particular order. First up is Hunger, meaning you need to pay a food for every building you have or you lose population. Then you are losing blueprints, people to accidents, and eventually the arrival of the robots.
You see the future has robots, of course it does. Totally guaranteed to not go haywire. Honest. Well when we say guaranteed that is a percentage and its not 100%. Robots are the main source of population depletion in the game. Here is where I reveal the lede I have buried. The winner of the game is the person with the most population left at the end of the game. The game ends when one of the colonies runs out of population.
Since we all start with the same amount of population, how do we feed the rampaging robots? Well each building you construct attracts some new people to the colony, a number on each building telling you how much population it contains. When you run out of population tokens, you can crack open those buildings and extract the juicy human goodness. Of course they get discarded when you do this, and your carefully built engine gets torn apart by a monster. You.
You spend the first half of the game building your base. Bending the cards to your vision as you build your utopian society, corporate mining outpost, or something in between. You’ll revel in how efficient you have made each of your actions, you’ll pile money, food, and boxes high. Boxes don’t have any inherent value but various cards manipulate their use making them a fundamental part of your economy.
The buildings don’t only add to the action economy they can change the nature of the Progress Deck. Some will add Perks, cards that give only the player that added them a little resource bonus when they turn up. You might also add a development, mostly bonus cards that give you a bit of respite from the onslaught of the robot rampage.
As your glorious engine falls apart you can keep patching it up. The progress deck gets increasingly dangerous, and you get the chance to work less and less. When you do get an opportunity it feels awesome, a blessed relief from the robot onslaught. At the beginning of the game they come up so often, you feel like they are always going to be there. By the time the people are running for their lives, a bit of work is a nice respite, and a chance to get one of those precious buildings to crack open like a present on Christmas Day.
Now for some seeing their engine fall apart will be torturous, and it is. Above anything else though I found it hilarious. I’ve had games where I started out with a veritable farmer’s paradise full of markets and freshly grown produce. By the end I had a mine powered by solar panels and nothing else. The central deck binds the players together in a rollercoaster of highs and lows. You are all strapped in and cannot get out, the best you can do is predict when you will hit the heights and do your best to mitigate the troughs. The weird thing is the more other folk do well, adding perks and improvements, the more you feel like you can ride out the middle, merely coasting along revelling in the respite. But you can’t. The robots are still coming and you are just in a worse position to deal with it compared to everyone else. You curse their good luck, and your poor planning.
The progress deck hits everyone at the same time meaning the game zips along as folk take simultaneous actions, feed the rampagin robots, and decide which part of their engine to set alight. You celebrate your good fortunes, congratulate others on their good planning, and experience the agony of loss together. The twists don’t seem signifcant but planning for them can be the difference between a win and a loss, which does mean that folks who can card count, or just have a good memory, will have a bit of an advantage. That is an incredibly minor quibble.
Moon Colony Bloodbath took me totally by surprise. It has a beautiful arc and fantastic emergent stories of each of the colonies. The engine building is fun and feels incredibly satisfying, especially when you start ripping your own engine apart only to find that it is more robust than you realised. If we plan for the future, there is hope. Unless the robots get us first.
Thanks very much for visiting the site and reading this article. You are welcome to comment on the piece below or join our Discord. If you would like to support us financially you can do so via Patreon or one of the other methods on our site.
