Moon Colony Bloodbath

As you might guess from the name, Moon Colony Bloodbath is not a game of wondrous exploration. Instead, it’s a 50’s B-movie-inspired story of things going drastically, horribly wrong, as moon colonists find their systems fail, the people revolt, and their service robots turn on them.

There’s no board here outside of the individual boards where players keep track of their food, money, survivors and actions. Players are allotted a bunch of this stuff and also get four building cards. A small deck of cards (six starter cards that feature in every game, and two random twist cards) are shuffled into what will be referred to as the progress deck, and Robot cards, Development cards and Event cards are kept nearby.

Each round simply consists of the top card being flipped over and everyone doing as it instructs.

Four of the progress deck are Work cards: when these occur players each choose an action: mine for more money, farm for more cash, research for more building cards, restock for resources (more on those later) or pay cash to build, which is basically paying the cost to play a card from your hand to the table in front of you. Each building has a money cost, a survivor value, and either an ongoing benefit or one-off boost of some kind described on the bottom of the card. Two of the progress deck are the Twist cards, which are usually bad, and two are Trouble cards, which are definitely bad: both prompt you to add the next Event card to the progress deck – these are numbered and always added to the top of the progress deck, meaning they’ll be the next card up. The starting event is Hunger, which prompts everyone to pay food for each of their buildings. The next one is Paperwork, which impacts how many building cards you have. The third event prompts you to add the first Robot to the progress deck – Robots are always out of control and mowing down civilians – and as the game continues, not only do the Events mount up but some players buildings prompt Development cards to be added to the inaptly-named progress deck, generally making things even worse. Not only that, but whenever the progress deck runs out it’s reshuffled for the next round – so there is no escape from those awful cards!

The resource tokens are a kind of in-game currency that can sometimes be used to generate money, food, cards, or offset some kind of damage. Each card has enough to text on it to explain how it (might!) work.

Whenever you run out of survivors due to hunger, robots, or some other tragic mishap, you can lose one of your buildings for the survivor value (some buildings also trigger an event when they are lost). When you – or someone – runs out of survivors entirely, the game is over and the player with the most survivors is the winner. The only other – and less likely – way the game ends is when the final event is triggered: but reaching that event is a rather unlikely event in itself…