Verdict
Inside of me are two wolves. One of them thinks that Moon Colony Bloodbath is a stylish, humorous, approachable deck-builder with plenty of unique twists, but not too much replayability. The other thinks it’s a rich commentary on the race for technological innovation, and how much industry leaders are willing to sacrifice to succeed. Either way, this is a board game worth playing.
- Approachable puzzle-like gameplay
- Surprisingly poignant
- Lacks complexity and replayability
Beautiful Vistas! Amazing Cities! Fabulous Robots! Moon Colony Bloodbath is a board game that intrigues at first glance. It's the sinister juxtaposition that draws you in: the box lid's utopian art and slogans, with the word BLOODBATH splattered across it in gory font. It's an excellent bit of visual design that perfectly summarizes the game's deceptively simple theme.
We're not just here to talk about box art, though. Thankfully, for anyone who actually wants to play, Moon Colony Bloodbath is a wonderful little deck-builder, an elegant engine whose narrative is built into the very nuts and bolts of the bloodthirsty killing machine.
We should expect nothing less from designer Donald X. Vaccarino. This is the mind behind Dominion, board gaming's first-ever deck-builder. There are many (read: me) who still consider it one of the best board games of its genre. I'm not convinced that Moon Colony Bloodbath will have the longevity of its older sibling, but it's light years ahead when it comes to storytelling.
What is Moon Colony Bloodbath, anyway?
Moon Colony Bloodbath is one-part deck-builder and one-part deck-wrecker. You'll play as a pioneer of science, seeking to establish a new city on the moon. It's a new frontier, the next step in human progress! What could possibly go wrong?
There are four key resources you must juggle to set up a thriving colony: food to feed the masses, people, buildings, and 'boxes'. Buildings modify the basic resource-gathering actions you can take during a 'Work' phase, and they add more people to your colony. At first, these new arrivals live as abstract numbers on your building card, but if you don't have enough people tokens to discard, you can trash a building to generate said tokens. Many buildings offer benefits when lost, and this is a vital cog in Moon Colony Bloodbath's strategic gameplay.
Boxes, on the other hand, are non-descript resources that can only be placed on a building. Bearing a striking resemblance to Amazon warehouse deliveries, these are fuel for a number of in-game effects.
The most important of these resources, by far, is people; without them, your city collapses. A game ends when one player has lost all their city's citizens or, alternatively, the group reaches the end of a collective Progress deck. However your space expansion comes to a close, the player with the most people in their colony wins.
The Progress deck is one of Moon Colony Bloodbath's more unique features. Unlike your standard deck-builder, no one has their own unique deck of powers to cycle through. Instead, everyone contributes to and simultaneously resolves the Progress deck, which gradually fattens as the turns roll by.
This is not good news for your space colonists.
The more progress you make, the more consequences you face. It's possible to add positive cards to the Progress deck in the form of Developments and Perks, but most of the new additions are Events - and none of those are welcome news.
You're plagued by minor setbacks at first - hunger, paperwork - but before long, accidents begin to happen. Natural disasters take you by surprise. The ultra-convenient robots you brought along for the trip suddenly turn against you (who could have seen that coming?).
All the while, your population grows thin. All the while, Moon Colony Bloodbath feeds you chipper scraps of flavor text, phrases like "For a venture like this, you've got to expect a few hiccups" or "Apparently we needed fewer astronomers, and more plumbers".
Hooray for progress!
People are suddenly dying left and right. What did you expect, The Jetsons? That might be what the packaging sold you, but Moon Colony Bloodbath is far from utopian. In fact, it's far closer to our current world state than we might be comfortable with.
This is the era of reckless innovation. This is the era of pushing new technology out the door before it can be properly tested for faults, before any negative impact on human beings can be considered. This is a world where technological advancements are driven by the ego of individuals rather than to benefit wider humanity. Mad scientists are real, and they're not afraid to cut corners if it means being the first to plant their flag on a new planet.
I could be talking about the fact that Artificial Intelligence companies already have several wrongful death lawsuits at their doors. I might be referring to the push from multiple billionaires to commercialize space travel or add 'smart' AI features to every aspect of our lives.
But right now, I'm talking about a board game.
Moon Colony Bloodbath is a parable about the consequences of short-termism, the prioritization of short-term results over long-term security. It's something that many real-world companies, who bend to the quarterly demands of shareholders demanding profit, or who build their business models on shaky foundations to chase trends, can be accused of.
We see this everywhere in-game. Flavor text repeatedly implies that these killer robots, upon which these colonies rely for all manner of conveniences, were improperly tested before everyone shipped off to the moon.
We can see it in the very structure of the game itself. The simple rules make this an easy teach, and everyone takes off at a rapid pace, gleefully placing buildings and exploring the puzzle that their effects present. With some clever planning, you can quickly bypass the need for one or two resource types, and entire cities can rise overnight.
So far, so deck-builder. We're in the early stages of a business boom, where the cash cows are fat and the margins are high. But, soon, the Progress deck grows even fatter. The problems mount, and you find yourself having to liquidate the investments you built just to keep your pesky people alive.
The total collapse of society snowballs quickly in the second half of the game. It's utterly crushing to return to a combo-less, barebones landscape, and you'll soon become a nervous miser, counting people tokens like pennies. This is a late-stage-capitalist nightmare where the universe is contracting, and everyone is struggling - you've just got to hold out longer than your competitors.
Moon Colony Bloodbath's arc ends with a grueling, often frustrating fight to survive. It makes you question every other board game of this ilk that you've played, where expansion is the goal, and you're rewarded for progressing as fast as possible. When we play-act as entrepreneurs, or colonizers of land, who is suffering behind the scenes in the name of our efficiency? What is the price of our naive, oversimplified ideas of progress?
But is it a good game?
Sometimes, a board game can be more fun to analyze than it is to play. This is, thankfully, not the case with Moon Colony Bloodbath. If you can stop thinking doomsday thoughts about Artificial Intelligence for long enough, it's actually very easy to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
Games are easy to pick up, and they're exciting until the very end. While the mechanics lean heavily on randomness, there's enough balance to keep games nail-biting. One game saw a single scientist dominate throughout, throwing down buildings left and right, only to lose at the last moment by two people tokens.
Some buildings feel more obviously powerful than others (who wouldn't want a cloning station when people are your primary currency?), but generally the power levels feel evenly spread among players. There's plenty of opportunities for a brainiac who can spot the synergies between buildings to pull ahead, but they'll still need a bit of luck on their side.
The simplicity of Moon Colony Bloodbath is a real plus for gamers who want to get thoughtful, interesting titles to their tabletops quickly. Sadly, though, this is also the game's one major failing. It takes noticeable steps to increase replay value (the random Twist cards added to each deck mean you need to adopt vastly different strategies from game to game), but Moon Colony Bloodbath still has a problem in this department.
The shape of the game remains the same from game to game, even if the details of the Progress deck change. It's not quite as moreish and addictive as some of the best light games on the market right now. In its current form, it also doesn't have the strategic depth of something like Dominion, where you have slightly more control over what does and doesn't end up in your deck.
Still, it's poignant, stylish, and plenty entertaining enough for a game or two. I'm looking forward to showing it to friends.
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