What it is
Moon Colony Bloodbath is a survival card game set on a Moon where nothing goes the way it should. Everyone runs a colony, and the goal is to keep it alive longer than the others and reach the end with the most colonists still breathing.
In the middle of the table there’s a single deck for everyone, and each turn a card is flipped that applies to all players at once. When it’s a work card, everyone secretly picks what to do: get money or food, look for new buildings, build one. Buildings bring new colonists and powers that help the colony hold out. But the deck grows during the game, and trouble goes into it too, hunger, paperwork, robots gone haywire, accidents, each one worse than the last.
That’s where the interaction lies, in a deck everyone builds and everyone suffers. Every disaster takes a few people with it, and once your base is empty you start losing buildings. The game ends as soon as a colony has nobody left. If instead you reach the last event, the instruction manual, it means someone has finally read it, and the colonies are saved.
How it plays
The first cards are deceiving: you build, you produce, you play cards that improve your colony, and you start thinking it’s not as bad as they said. Then the events start piling up, explosions, leaking pipes, every kind of disaster, and if you didn’t get off to a good start the end comes and there’s no stopping it.
You know from the start that some colonists will have to be sacrificed, and that’s normal. Besides the strategy there’s this fun side, the events that wreck everyone’s work, and you have to take it for what it is. Laugh about it and don’t get discouraged, because the others are in trouble too.
The nugget
The title comes from a record: Moon Colony Bloodbath is an EP by John Darnielle, the singer of the Mountain Goats, and John Vanderslice. Donald X. Vaccarino, the designer of Dominion, says the songs have nothing to do with a moon colony. He just liked the title, and kept it. The idea of a shared deck, on the other hand, came to him while playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 0.
At our table
If something can go wrong, it will. And on this Moon, sooner or later, everything goes wrong!
How long does Moon Colony Bloodbath take?
The box says 45–90 minutes. At our table: 60 minutes at two, 55 minutes at four, 70 minutes at five.
The box
What’s the game where everything goes wrong and you still have fun?
The ones where, at the end of the night, people remember the disasters more than the winner.
Also on the table
Thanks to Rio Grande Games for sending us Moon Colony Bloodbath.