Moon Colony Bloodbath Looks Like a 50s B-Movie Poster and Plays Like a Slow-Motion Car Crash

Box art alone got this one onto my shelf, that pulpy retro sci-fi cover with the astronaut couple grinning under a domed city, total 1950s B-movie energy, exactly the kind of thing I can’t walk past in a game store even when I’ve never heard of the designer. Turns out the designer is Donald X. Vaccarino, the Dominion guy, so the pedigree is actually there under the campy paint job, which I didn’t clock until I got it home and started reading the rules.

This is a shared deck card game where you’re building up a moon colony, and the deck slowly fills with poison cards that everyone has to deal with, so it plays less like a race to win and more like watching a death spiral in slow motion, closest comparison I’ve seen and fully agree with is Ponzi Scheme or Galaxy Trucker, you know it’s all about to go wrong and you’re along for the ride anyway. Someone online called it a reverse race, least failed colonist wins, and that’s exactly the feeling, there’s no clean victory here, just surviving marginally better than the person next to you.

Solo mode is fine, decent way to learn the cards, but it’s really a multiplayer game and specifically gets better the more people you throw poison at each other with, adding developments to the shared deck that hurt other players more than yourself is where the real nastiness lives. Box ships with a small plastic insert that actually keeps everything organized, which surprised me a little given how small and cheap this game otherwise feels, most little boxes like this just give you a baggie and a shrug.

Not a deep game and it’s not trying to be. It’s a funny little death spiral simulator with a great cover, and it delivers on exactly what it promises in under thirty minutes.