Settling the Moon

🌕 Luna Capital was quite hot at SPIEL21, though we didn’t have the opportunity to try it back then. It kind of disappeared from the radar after that, until I saw it a couple of times here on Instragram. Now we finally had the chance to play it and realized we have been missing out. This game is a gem! 🤩

In Luna Capital you play as a corporation building a settlement on the Moon 🏗️. You do this by placing down cards and tiles in a grid in front of you. You can have up to 3 rows of cards and they all have spaces for 3-4 tiles on them. Cards are also numbered and can only be played in an ascending order in each row. ☝️ There are a bunch of different tiles to draft and place, but most commonly you want to put same types in one big contiguous group - which can prove difficult, especially with the card placement rules.

The game is split up into 3 phases with 4 rounds each. In each round you have to pick a column from the game board and take its card and tile(s). Then you have to place one card and every chosen tile into your tableau-grid. This is where the most fun twist of the game comes into play 😁: with each round, more tiles will be added to the columns, so for example in the 4th round of each phase you will get a card and 4 tiles. This really makes choosing what to draft and how to place them optimally a real puzzle! 🙃

After 12 rounds you count up points. Some tiles score for the largest group as I mentioned, but there are different adjacency or majority scoring tiles too, as well as goal cards that you could claim at the end of the phases.

💬 I really like the “choose a pair of things'' drafting mechanic. You might need a card but don’t like the tiles or vice versa. Weighing up choices always stays interesting. The escalation of the number of tiles as rounds go by adds a lot to the excitement! 👌 I like the aesthetics of the game too, though the iconography could be a bit better - most tiles have a heart on them with a symbol inside, and it's hard to differentiate at a glance.
Luna Capital might seem like just another gateway game, but I think it is in the upper tier of gateways!