Designed by: Stefan Feld
In Luna, players are competing orders of Pagan worshippers fight for the right to decide the successor of the Moon Priestess. A fight to the death? A blood sacrifice? No – a game of strategic and tactical political chicanery.
The board is a series of islands, each of which can be visited by novices to complete certain actions: smaller ones allow you to gather actions for subsequent play, and your main objective is to populate the biggest island of all – the temple – with your novices, to sway the victory your way.
Each player begins the game with five such novices at their disposal – though you can recruit more during play – and they begin the game scattered around the various isles. On your turn you have various actions you can take involving your novices – moving them from island to island, or removing them (in pairs) from an island in order to pick up one of the special action chits. These can then be played: boats can move novices around, herbs help used novices back onto an island, shrines can be built that make your economy cheaper: on an island where you’ve built a shrine, one novice can now to the work of two.
But as previously stated, you really want to get monks into the temple. Adding a monk there is done by taking a tile from a path around the main island – either behind the guard, or ahead of him if you have a bribe handy. Each tile has a number value so when you add it to the temple, any adjacent tiles occupied by opponent’s monks get bumped out – and no longer score points. There are two puzzles at play here – the economy of novices, shrines and actions, and the temple scoring. But rewind back to the start now because there are three more factors to consider as well: shuffling around the islands are the Builder, the Apostate, and the Moon Priestess herself. A shrine may only be built where the builder is. The Apostate costs you points if you are present on his island come the end of a round. And the Priestess, as you might expect, scores you points.
There’s a fair bit going on in Luna – we’ve not told you everything here – but after six rounds of cognitive thought and tactical battle, the player with the most points wins.
More than first meets the eye. Although there's no direct combat as such, just one play of the game will reveal it's tormented inner soul: you can be ousted from point-scoring positions in various places, left behind on tie-breakers, hit by the unexpected arrival of the Apostate...
High dropping to moderate. Like most Stefan Feld games, it's more a puzzle than a story, and every play requires a bit of thought.
There are different ways to play Luna; aggressively, reactively, tactically... but the main puzzle will always be the challenge of realising plans without opponents outwitting you.
There are no random factors in Luna, but it's not a game you can exactly tick off either. Each play brings new challenges.
1-4
Players
12+
Years
90-120
Mins
Sam says
I enjoyed Luna well enough - almost more chewing it over after the event than the actual play. This designer's games never fail to have a little intrigue in them; they're always cleverly designed and although the theme rarely comes through, the play is intricate. That said though I think there have been games published since that do the puzzle thing in a more satisfying way, visually speaking. And games where the puzzle element has felt more overtly fun. It's a hard one to sum up, but for whatever reason despite impressing me, I didn't feel a huge amount of warmth for it - unlike sister game Macao, for instance, which I've played a zillion times and still enjoy a great deal.