So I played LUNA Capital first 2-handed and a day later against my partner.
And to make it quick: I’ll be selling this one. Oh it’s better than Spacebiff’s review made me fear. But it is not the right game for us.
2 players. 4 turns played, Phase B started.
Rules Summary
So the game is played over 3 phases (A, B, C) of 4 turns each with players playing sequentially. In the end the person with the best point-salad gets a tasty snack. Points are acquired by placing tiles, placing tiles adjacent to other tiles or making areas of the same type of tile or having the most meteor tiles or reach certain variable bonus conditions at the end of a phase.
You start with a hand of 3 cards (one of the neat things in this game is how your hand of cards is handled).
In the center of the table there is a market of 4 cards that each have 4 building spaces or 2 building spaces and a double-wide or double-high space (to improve adjacency). Most of the cards have 1 and some have 2 of the spaces preprinted with something (mostly useless meteors or scaffolding, sometimes useful stuff). The cards have numbers from 1 to 10.
Below each card is a smaller display of 1 to 4 tiles. As a phase progresses the number of tiles player’s get with the card they draft matches with the number of the current turn in the phase (1 to 4).
On their turn players draft a card. however, one spot–the one that the last player drafted or on the very first turn the left-most spot–has the “fresh-in” marker on it. If they want to draft that card, they have to discard one from their hand. Cards are worth VP at the end. And there is only 1 rare building that will let you draw an additional card. So taking the “fresh-in” card is a pretty big deal–in my games it happened 3 times. Towards the end of the game it makes the most sense.
So a player picks a card and they get the card and all the associated tiles.
Then they have to play a card from their hand orthogonally adjacent to their other cards with a maximum of 3 rows and the numbers have to be going up from left to right and no number may appear twice in a row. The rows do not have to have their number 7 in the same spot and you can just jump from 5 to 7 to 10 if that’s what you have. As you will only ever play 12 cards into your tableau it is absolutely going to happen. (this part reminds me of Welcome To). There are also little robots in the game that are acquired from certain tiles that you place on the card you play to ignore the number.
Once the card is placed they have to place all their tiles. Tiles are either one of 4 different types of life support systems that score from having a large connected area, living quarters for engineers that derive points from specific adjacent life support systems, general living quarters that score via the number of specific types of tiles in the tableau, or some specialty tiles most of which do not score points but give you some more flexibility what to do on your turn.
My final tableau on game 2.
Doesn’t sound too bad. But on teaching it is a lot to keep in mind and my partner completely missed the rule where there were different types of life support systems. I caught it before it ruined his tableau completely but he was so miffed about it the rest of the game didn’t go well.
I think it’s pretty enough, small enough and has a decent “interface” (setup time, table presence, table handling etc.)
Now my biggest problem with the game is this: it’s not going to get to the table with 2 people again. A solo mode is no longer a big selling point with me as my solo queue is filled with far better games. The puzzle while somewhat engaging is horribly AP inducing as you have to consider which card to place, which tiles to take and games that turn even me into an AP wreck are not going to see the table here. This was a risky buy on almost no information. I am sure someone else will like it much more than I do.
I’ll rate it a 7/10. Would definitely play with other willing people but I do not like it enough to try and convince others to play it.