Lunar Rush

• Designer: Steven “Skippy” Brown
• Publisher: Dead Alive Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 13+
• Time: 45-75 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Games
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3O8duZx

Lunar Rush is a simultaneous-play Euro-style board game that combines time-based resource management, market economics, bidding, and tableau/engine-building into a refreshing new genre. You play as one of Earth’s four major corporate conglomerates, competing to mine the Moon for the newly-discovered “wonder materials”: lunethyst crystals and lunarium ore.  Every turn, players use their GigaCredits (GC = VP) to bid for the best space routes to and from the Moon. The slower the route, the more you can load on the ship. On the Moon, players simultaneously upgrade their bases and place their astronaut workers to produce the resources needed to maintain the base, as well as mine Moon goods to sell in Earth’s bustling dynamic markets. The game ends after seven turns, and the winner is the player with the highest score as measured in GC! The race to win the new gold rush is on!

To set up the game, place the main board on the table. The Initiative Order board and an Earth Market board nearby.  8 Gold modules are selected and placed on the table in a tableau.  Each player takes a Moon base board in their color and all the bits in their color – green Life Support starts on 6, yellow Energy starts on 0 (ignore the misprint on the board on the yellow track).   Each player gets 3 Astronauts on their Moon board and the rest are placed on the main board (on Earth). 

The game is played in 7 rounds, each with an Earth Phase, then a Moon Phase and finally a Market phase.

In the Earth Phase, first check to see if any Moonbound routes need to be closed (because they will not reach their destination before the end of the game) – and if so, place a “route closed” card on that space.  Then, players bid for initiative – to figure out the order in which players can choose the routes to be used.  Players have a set of 5 bid cards to use in this process.  There is a cost associated with this – players deduct VPs equal to their bid (and multiplied in later rounds).  In initiative order, players choose a route – Moonbound or Earthbound – and place a ship at the start of said route. When all players have chosen a route, the process is repeated so that each player will have chosen two routes in each round.  In general, there is an inverse relationship between the speed of transport and the number of things that actually get moved.  

Once the routes are chosen, players can simultaneously load their Moonbound ships. There is no cost to place things onto ships going to the moon. Once things are loaded, ships are moved one space ahead on their route – though the quickest ship will make it to the Moon this turn!  Any ships that arrive at the moon are unloaded onto the player’s Moon board.

In the Moon phase, players can build gold modules (in reverse initiative order) by paying the cost on an available module card.  Players can build a max of 3 gold modules in the game.  Now, your Moon base produces things based on the way you allocate your astronauts into your different modules.  If you make things, place cubes on the x1 storage card (or if you make 2 of that thing, you could place one cube on your x2 storage card).  You can also upgrade you modules (up to two times each) by paying the upgrade cost at the bottom of each module.  Don’t miss the two modules which do not have a basic module on your board and only have an upgrade price on the right of your board. After all things are produced, make sure you can support your astronauts – each requires a Life support point and a place to sleep, or else they die (removed from the game permanently) and you take a 25VP penalty!  Finally, all players load their Earthbound ships with ore/gems or astronauts and then each ship moves a space towards Earth.  Ships that reach earth are put into the corresponding spots on the Earth Spaceport.

In the Market phase, players can sell their Moon things at the current market price.  Ships sell from left to right on the Spaceport arrival row. All items of a type sell for the current price and then the price drops one space per thing sold.  All players sell their stuff.  Then, if the market price for a good is now below the threshold space (dark colored), the price refreshes a bit based on how many things were sold total this turn.

Repeat this process seven times.  Any Earthbound ships are still allowed to get to the Earth and sell their cargo, though there is no refreshing of prices for these late-to-arrive ships.  Then, players score points for any remaining things on the moon as well as points for their module upgrades.  The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the lowest initiative in the final round.

My thoughts on the game

The main concept of the game – the transport of things between Earth and the Moon is pretty neat.  I really like the way you have to figure out the balance between the speed of transport with the quantity of things moved.  And, the outer space theme generally appeals to me, so this one was higher on the list to get to the game table.

The rules are in a thick 32 page book, about 20 of which are reserved for the basic game.  There is a bunch of theme interspersed in the pages with little pull quotes from the imaginary company leaders – though I wish a bit more effort had been spent on the actual organization.  This is one of those books where it feels like all of the rules are included somewhere, but the overall presentation is a bit confusing.  For instance, at the very beginning of the turn description, the rules jump right into an explanation of the different routes, but this is super confusing when you don’t know what routes are, why you would want to use them or really how the overall turn is set up.  FWIW, there is a 4 page FAQ/errata file available online which should be printed and added to your game box (and supports my feelings that less thematic fluff and more rules in the book would be better).

The components are generally well made, and I do like the double layer Moon boards.  The game does hit one of my pet peeves which is using multiplier cards and tokens.  I find that players often make mistakes with this sort of situation, and I would have preferred more cubes in the game as opposed to value being determined by card location on a particular multiplier.  This may just be my pet peeve, but it’s something that I really dislike.  The other thing I don’t like is the parakeet-y Gold Module cards. They are printed with some sort of foil holographic effect, and as you can see in the picture, they’re fairly iridescent and completely illegible.  A full blown loss for form over function.

The game itself is an interesting logistics puzzle where you constantly try to balance the speed and the quantity of things moving between the Earth and the Moon.  There is a little bit of “engine building” on the Moon where you have to get your operations set up – you need to be able to house and feed all your people, and then figure out how to have excess people up there in order to get the gems and ore that you will sell for victory points.  Of course, your ability to set up your engine will depend on how quickly you’re able to get people and supplies to the moon!

The bidding system is interesting in that players have to put a monetary (VP) value on their desire to choose their position in route choice.  In some rounds, you have a specific goal in mind, and you’ll have to pay more to try to get the route needed to achieve your goals.  Of course, if you choose early for the first choice, you’ll have a later choice on the way back.  In one game, I tried to take the cheap route (cycling my 1 and 2 bid card) for most of the game, and gaining 2 to 4 points on someone each turn did add up to a significant total at the end of the game; and given the snake draft nature of the route choice, while I never got my first choice route, I also never got one that I simply didn’t want as I was always drafting near the middle of the process.

I was initially worried about the timing at the end of the game as the Fast 1 Route is going to sell first, and therefore have the best rates in the market – but since the capacity of goods is so small, it’s not that much of an advantage.  In fact, in general, I’ve found that the fight in the final round is for the medium and slow routes because people need ships that are large enough to transport all of their goods. While everything converts into points at the end, even the worst price on Earth is better than the leftover moon price.

Games take about an hour or just more, and this is one of those games where I don’t seem to notice the time going by.  I’m pretty focused on working out the routes and what I plan to bring on them, and then having to recalculate everything when someone ends up taking the route I wanted…. For me, it’s a fine game, and I will probably try this out again.  If nothing else, our group is building a small library of Moon themed games, and we might have an entire lunar night at some point…

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 play): I liked much of what the game does, but it had some rough edges that prevent me rating it higher. The way the market pricing works is odd; prices can never get back to where they started, and they don’t really work on a supply and demand basis. (Something like the system in Planet Steam would work better.) With three players it seems likely that two will produce one of the “wonder materials” and the third will produce the other one, which is a significant advantage for that player; possibly with some of the extra game modules it won’t work out that way, but without them it’s not clear why it wouldn’t.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. 
• Neutral. Dale, Steph H, Dan B.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3O8duZx