Moon Colony Bloodbath

I almost passed this one over sight unseen because, and I say this with affection, it looks rough. Rulebook art alone had me expecting a bargain-bin knockoff, and I’ve seen enough actual bargain-bin knockoffs come through estate boxes to have a nose for it. But the designer’s name kept coming up in the same breath as people whose stuff I already own and trust, so I gave it a shot before writing it off on looks alone, which I don’t always have the patience to do.

Everyone plays out of the same shared deck of colony developments, and that deck just keeps filling with poison cards as the game goes, worse and worse, and you’re allowed to make it actively worse for everyone else if it helps you personally. It’s a shared death spiral you’re all steering together, which sounds miserable written out like that and instead plays like one of the funnier things I’ve had at my table this year. The player who fails the least, rather than the one who does the most, is declared the winner, which is a strange enough framing that it colors every decision differently than a normal race game would.

Solo works fine, better than I expected from a beat-your-own-score structure I usually find hollow, but this is clearly built for a full table watching each other’s colonies spiral toward disaster together. There’s a reverse-race feeling to it, everyone dreading being first to collapse rather than racing to be first to finish, and that tension carries the whole thing.

Component-wise it’s a small box, thin cards that I’d sleeve if I planned on keeping it in heavy rotation, standard third-party 59 by 92 millimeter sleeves fit fine. Not a beautiful object. A genuinely good time anyway, campy moon-colony theme and all.