It’s been a little bit since I’ve written about any board games. Not because I haven’t been playing any, but because I’ve mostly been playing old favorites (hello Tiger and Dragon!) or games I don’t think anyone needs me to review (hello 7 Wonders!).
That said, a newer game has managed to sneak its head into my play sessions recently, and so it seems only fair to give it a writeup.
Everyone please welcome Moon Colony Bloodbath! Now before we go any further, there’s one thing I want everyone to know.
I fucking loathe this game.
Gameplay
Moon Colony Bloodbath is an engine builder. You start with a population of colonists, some money, and a few building cards. Then, via the power of sweat, grit, and repeatedly taking the mine action, you’ll turn this into a successful moon colony. Or at least, that’s the plan.
Realistically, that is not actually happening. I have played several games of Moon Colony Bloodbath, and only in one was the end of the game reached, triggered by exhausting the event deck.
No, the actual goal is to make your colony hold on just a bit longer than everyone else’s. Because despite this being an engine builder, at some point, things are going to start going wrong faster than you can make them go right.
But first, let’s talk about building your moon colony.
Each round you’ll flip up and resolve cards from the event deck. “Work” cards will let you take actions like building, mining, gathering food, or research. You’ll also have a hand full of building cards. Building cards are your standard engine building improvements. You take the build action to spend money to put them into play, and they buff your basic actions, or provide some other utility. Mining gets you money for buildings. Harvesting gets you food, and research draws you more cards.
Most cards though, aren’t action work cards. Most of them are trouble cards, and these will have you pay resources to stay in the game. Maybe colonists, maybe cards, maybe food, doesn’t matter. And while more and more of these cards will be added each round, the total number of actions you can take does not.
All of a sudden, as the small scale disasters build, you’ll eventually find yourself without any colonists. And now all those precious buildings, all those elegant engine pieces, must be scrapped to produce colonists and keep yourself in the game.
This, then, is the latter half of the game, where we switch from the “Moon Colony” portion to the “Bloodbath” bit, as you desperately try to keep someone, anyone, alive. You need to keep literally any sort of engine functional for as long as possible before it’s fed into the unceasing maw of the event deck.
This seems like it would set itself up to be a comedy of errors, but it isn’t. Not really. I’ll talk more about my problems with the tone later, but I’ve found the later parts of Moon Colony Bloodbath to be an exhausting slog. You know that feeling of taking your last turn in a euro game? That one where it’s not tactically logical to do anything but maximize your victory points?
Moon Colony Bloodbath is taking that turn over and over and over until someone dies. It’s a dull math problem where your choices might not even matter if someone else is doing significantly better than you, and where you will never have enough resources to actually build back up again.
In short: it ass.
Now, I will admit that this opinion is not shared by my friends. One loves it, and the other thinks it’s pretty good to great. Well, at least mechanically.
This brings me to my second big problem with the game.
Art Direction and Aesthetic
Despite my complaints above, I think I’d feel more generous to Moon Colony Bloodbath if it felt funnier. It doesn’t for a lot of reasons, but a big one is the art.
The art of Moon Colony Bloodbath is bad, but not in a “technical execution” sort of way, more that it doesn’t commit to saying or doing anything. A sort of “I don’t think the art director understood what bloodbath means” sort of way. The game seems to be going for a pulpy tone, but never really commits to the bit. Nothing ever rises to the quality of shit like this.
Or I dunno, stuff like this?
There’s a real level of comedy you can do with these things, but it’s just not remotely present.
Then there are the few cards that attempt to be funny… and look, they’re just bad. They’re really bad, and I hate them. One player character that’s a Rastafarian. The flavor text implies he’s giving the moon colonists weed. It’s uncomfortable, and just feels weirdly racist.
The art direction totally fails to elevate the game in any way, and it sucks because I feel like it’s obvious how to land some of these jokes. There’s a robot that is mechanically butchering and cooking colonists, but its art looks like an ad from a 1950’s Skymall. There’s a locker full of organs, and it doesn’t even elicit a giggle.
Like. C’mon. Stick a human leg in the pot or something, or a skull on a cutting board. Instead, though, we get this bland miserable retro-futurism Americana.
I call this a failure of art direction, because as far as I can tell, Franz Vohwinkel (the artist who illustrated the game) has a pretty decent portfolio, especially of magic cards. He seems to be a perfectly good artist.
But it seems like someone told him he was illustrating a euro game, and forgot to mention that it’s a euro game where everyone fucking dies.
Anyway
I don’t like Moon Colony Bloodbath. I find its gameplay miserable and its art static and dull. It provides neither the satisfaction of fictional buildup, or a particularly amusing black comedy.
It is a slow, grinding, and dusty chokehold of dull math and duller choices.
Oh! And it’s $50 fuckin bucks!
[Editor’s note: as someone who bought and loves this game, all I have to say is “skill issue.”]