Build Your Engine While It Gets Mercilessly Torn Apart in ‘Moon Colony Bloodbath’

You know engine-building games, but Moon Colony Bloodbath describes itself as an engine-losing game, where the last engine standing wins.

For as long as people have laid eyes upon the moon, they’ve dreamed what it would be like to live there. Well, maybe we should slow our roll on setting up that moon base. It just might turn out to be a Moon Colony Bloodbath. Not to be confused with the Mountain Goats album. If that’s the case, sign me up.

Moon Colony Bloodbath Overview

Humanity is no longer bound to Earth; we are colonizing and building cities on the moon! Hopefully, nothing goes wrong. And then nothing continues going wrong over and over and over again.

In Moon Colony Bloodbath, players plan, strategize, and most importantly, survive on the moon. Sometimes the event cards that you draw will throw a small wrench in all of your carefully laid out plans, while other times they’ll throw a catastrophic wrench in those plans. And in other infrequent times, the cards may actually help you build your thriving city on the moon. The player with the most survivors in their moon colony wins, so good luck!

^{Images via Board Game Geek}

How To Play Moon Colony Bloodbath

In Moon Colony Bloodbath, players are each trying to survive the longest against an endless torrent of unfortunate events. While the game throws killer robots, moonquakes, and piles of bureaucratic paperwork at the players, they will be actively fighting an uphill battle in trying to build and manage their moon base. It’s a game of 2 steps forward, 3 steps backward.

On each turn, a card is drawn from the central, shared deck. This card will determine what players can do on their turn. Throughout the game, players will add cards to this shared deck, some cards will be good, but most will be bad.

Players will be gathering resources, building new buildings, recruiting new astronauts, and researching new tech. Each of these are vital to attempt to outpace the oncoming disasters that will inevitably end everyone’s bases. Once there is only one player with any living astronauts, that player wins.

But, each game also has twists. These twist cards will modify and change the overall strategies for the players. This makes each game feel fresh and new, with certain twists making one strategy way more viable, while others might really inhibit it.

Should I Buy This Game?

Moon Colony Bloodbath is designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, who made Dominion! So this is coming from a good background of gameplay design. If you’re the sort of person who gets frustrated seeing his hard work get torn apart, this game might not be for you. But if you can revel in the chaotic absurdity of the situation, and laugh as your astronauts get torn asunder, you might love Moon Colony Bloodbath.

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Author: Matt Sall

Matt has loved games of all kinds his whole life: board, video, war, roleplaying, and card. He's worked as a writer for BoLS since 2017.