Moon Colony Bloodbath

• Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
• Publisher: Rio Grande Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4jyUt0p
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Cities on the moon! This will be humanity’s crowning achievement. At last, no longer bound to the Earth — the moon, a stepping stone to the stars. The rockets are loaded with supplies and colonists; the robots are programmed and ready. Everything has been planned down to the tiniest detail, and there is no chance whatsoever of failure. To the moon!

Moon Colony Bloodbath is an engine-building, engine-losing tableau game, with a shared deck the players build that makes things happen, many of them bad things that kill people in your moon colony, but some positive, and some that let you build up.

Each player starts with a player mat, a set of 5 perk cards, 30 Colonists, 4 money and 4 food.  The initial Progress deck is constructed – 2 Twist cards, 4 Work cards and 2 Trouble cards. This is shuffled and placed on the table.  The Twist deck and the Robots deck are shuffled and a matching token is placed on top.  The Event and Development cards are kept nearby.

On a turn, one card is revealed from the shared deck, and that card is resolved by all players.  For a work card, each player takes an action of their choice simultaneously: mining for money, farming for food, researching for cards, constructing a new building, or restocking boxes on buildings. Twists vary from one game to the next and this adds variety to each game.  Each time you take an action, be sure to check your building cards; your action may be modified by a building or a new action can be triggered by a building.  The buildings are color coded to the action type.  Each player has 4 action chits, and each time they choose an action, they first place it on the appropriate space on the circle on their player mat and then slide it into one of the four central spaces.  The chits are taken back each time the Progress deck is shuffled. 

Trouble cards add a new event card to the deck: hunger, paperwork, glitches, accidents, leaks, power failure — whatever can go wrong will go wrong, then whenever the deck is shuffled (each time you have gone through the entire deck and need to draw a new card), you can prepare for all those events once again.   The Event cards are numbered and you always add them in ascending numerical order to the Progress deck.  

Many of the event cards will cause you to lose people.  When you need to do so, first discard any people tokens you have on your player mat. If you do not have enough tokens, then destroy a building, and take a number of tokens equal to the number in the upper right of the building.  Some buildings also have a LOST action that triggers at this time.

Players can add cards to the shared deck, too, whether perks that are only for a particular player or development cards that affect all players. Remember that, in general, when a card is added to the deck, it is placed on top of the deck and therefore is likely the next thing to happen.

The game lasts until one player’s moon colony has no people remaining, or until the players reach the bottom of the event deck. At that point, the player with the most survivors wins.

My thoughts on the game

I really like the idea of the engine building/engine destroying game here in Moon Colony Bloodbath.  Everyone contributes to a common deck – and everyone knows what to expect in that deck, though not the order of appearance – and the key here is to figure out how to survive as best you can.  It’s a given in this game that bad things will happen, and the same bad things keep happening to you over and over, so you should really try to figure out how to mitigate those bad things and make them just kinda bad.

The gameplay itself is quite simple and straightforward – cards get flipped up.  If you work, you either gain stuff or build a card.  If an event, twist or robot comes up, bad things tend to happen. Yet each game plays out differently based on how the Progress Deck gets shuffled and revealed.  Different Twist and Development cards added to the deck will likely also be different each game.  Finally, the many buildings in the game each come with their own special abilities and rules; and you’ll have to craft a strategy to survive based on the building cards you’re lucky enough to draw and then rich enough to build.

There is a pretty decent arc to the game due to the Event cards (which are always added into the deck in the same order).  The early events are not too punishing, and you get a chance to build up an engine and hopefully get some synergistic buildings built.  As the game progresses, you will add Event after Event that kills off your people.   At this point, you’ll have to start discarding buildings to generate those people to be killed.  The catch here is that those buildings are the cogs in your engine, and each time you have to discard one from play, you lose that little bit of your grand survival plan.  I would caution you to not feel to smug about this great set of buildings you have erected, as part of that combination will likely be blown to bits by an Event or a Robot.  It can actually be quite a tough decision to figure out which piece of your engine is the least needed at the time… (or which has the best LOST action that will make the pain of the building loss not be quite so bad).  

Given that Event cards are added at a fixed pace (two added with each trip thru the deck), the game pacing will be constant from game to game.  Additionally, it’s hard for this game to outstay its welcome because the 13th event card is the one that automatically ends the game.  So, the game will last no longer than seven times through the deck.

The rules are written in the folksy conversational style that the designer is known for; you can see this in some of his other games as well as his Designer Diaries that can be found online.  While it is not the most formal prose, it reads just like the designer is talking to you, and as you might expect, it is pretty easy to follow.  There are a few typos in the rulebook as well as a misplaced illustration on the back of one of the player boards,  but they are easily figured out and should not have any bearing on your enjoyment of the game.  There is a bit of reliance of icons in the rules and cards, but once you learn the icons, it actually makes it quite easy to play the game (or scan the rules for questions).

This game has been a blast so far.  It’s honestly rare for a game to reach ten plays around here, and this one is getting close.  It’s been enjoyed by my regular game group as well as more casual gamers – explaining why it has gotten so many plays.  I’ve not been the biggest fan of some of Donald’s non-Dominion releases, but Moon Colony Bloodbath is right in my sweet spot – quick, varied, and filled with fun.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4jyUt0p