Review: Moon Colony Bloodbath

Introduction & Overview

Cities on the Moon! This will be humanity’s greatest achievement. Finally, freed from the bonds of Earth; the Moon, a stepping stone to the stars. The rockets are loaded with supplies and colonists; the robots are programmed and ready. Everything has been planned down to the smallest detail, and there is absolutely no chance of failure. To the Moon!

This is how Moon Colony Bloodbath is presented to us, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino (Dominion, Kingdom Builder). First published in 2025 by Rio Grande Games in an English version. The artwork is done by Franz Vohwinkel (Beyond the Sun, Ra, Puerto Rico).

It is not published in Spanish, so you will have to resort to the import market (the game is quite language-dependent). It allows for games of 1 to 5 players, with a suggested minimum age of 14 and an approximate duration of between 45 and 90 minutes. The MSRP is €49.95. For this review, a copy of the English version by Rio Grande Games was used.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 29.7×29.7×7.2 cm. (standard square box like Ticket to Ride), we find the following components:

• 200 Cards (59×91 mm.):
  • 90 Building Cards
  • 25 Perk Cards (5 per color)
  • 25 Twist Cards
  • 20 Development Cards
  • 20 Robot Cards
  • 13 Event Cards
  • 7 Starting Deck Cards
• 5 Player Boards (cardboard)
• 75 Population Tokens (cardboard):
  • 40 of Value 1
  • 35 of Value 5
• 60 Ore Tokens (cardboard):
  • 40 of Value 1
  • 20 of Value 5
• 50 Food Tokens (cardboard):
  • 40 of Value 1
  • 10 of Value 5
• 40 Crate Tokens
• 20 Action Tokens
• Robot Deck Token
• Twist Deck Token
• Rulebook

How to Play

Moon Colony Bloodbath is a card game in which we immerse ourselves in an alternate history where the human race has managed to colonize the Moon in the mid-20th century thanks to automation. Each player will be in charge of a lunar base, and their goal is to try to survive as best as possible in the face of a series of catastrophic misfortunes that will happen one after another. Players will be able to resolve actions at certain points during the game. These actions can be mining (to obtain credits), farming (to obtain food), drawing cards, storing crates (which is another resource), or playing cards (cards represent buildings, have a credit cost, and employ a certain number of people, providing a specific effect). The flow of the game is governed by a deck of cards that initially only contains action resolution and event activation cards. Actions allow players to choose one of the aforementioned actions, and events will gradually add different types of cards to the deck, which will activate recurrently every time the deck runs out and is reshuffled. The effects of these cards will, as a general rule, be detrimental, wreaking havoc on the lunar bases. The goal is to try to endure nearly seven full deck cycles without running out of population. Every time we run out of population on our player board, we will have to discard a played building card, which will grant us its population. The game ends when a player runs out of population and played cards, and whoever has the most population between tokens and played cards wins.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the fundamental element of the game, the Population. This is represented by Population Tokens that players will accumulate in their play area. The core objective of the game is to try to accumulate as much population as possible.

The primary way to increase population is by playing Building Cards. These show the ore cost to play the cards in their upper left corner and the amount of population the player adds to their colony in the upper right corner. In the bottom banner, we find the card’s effect. The background color of the card is associated with the action that triggers said effect. Some cards have a light pink box that applies the moment the card is played, and others have a dark pink box that applies when the card is discarded. That is because if a player has to lose population and does not have enough tokens, they will have to discard one or several building cards to get the amount of population indicated on the card in tokens.

One of the central elements of the game is the Development Deck. Each turn of the game, a card from this deck will be revealed and its effect applied. It starts with six initial cards, four of them being Work cards, which allow players to resolve one of the five available actions in the game. The other two cards will gradually add event cards.

The Event Cards are ordered and two cards will be added in each cycle of the deck (because there are two starting cards that will keep adding these cards). Generally, these events are negative and will force players to lose population.

Some building cards allow players to add Perk Cards to the development deck. Each player will have a deck of perk cards that allow them to obtain a reward in a unique way (only for the player who introduced that card into the deck).

In addition to the starting cards, at the beginning of the game, two Twist Cards are introduced into the deck, adding two specific events. There will be both beneficial and detrimental ones for the players. This deck remains available during the game because some effects add new twist cards to the deck.

Some building cards add Development Cards to the deck. These, generally speaking, are positive effects that players can typically activate in exchange for handing over various elements.

And the last element that can be added to the deck are the Robot Cards, which, unlike development cards, are always harmful. These will enter the deck due to certain events.

Each player has a Player Board which features various spaces as a reserve for population, ore, and food. In the central area, we have four spaces to place action tokens, which serve to track how many work cards have come out in the current cycle of the deck.

And finally, although it is not a resource per se because it has no base utility, there are the Crate Tokens. These will be placed on top of buildings. Some allow you to use the crates placed on them to execute certain effects. They can also be used when resolving event, robot, or twist effects.

That is enough to get started.

Setup

1. Shuffle the twist deck and reveal two cards, reading them aloud to all players.
2. Shuffle these cards together with the starting deck cards to form the game deck.
3. Shuffle the building cards and form a deck.
4. Shuffle the robot cards and set them aside, placing the robot deck token on top.
5. Shuffle the twist cards and set them aside, placing the twist deck token on top.
6. Form a general supply with the ore, food, population, and crate tokens.
7. Each player chooses a color and receives:
   • A player board (placed in their area)
   • 4 Action Tokens (set aside)
   • The starting resources indicated on their player board
   • 5 Perk Cards (set aside).
   • Each player draws 4 building cards to form their starting hand.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Moon Colony Bloodbath takes place over an indefinite number of turns in which players act simultaneously.

At the beginning of each turn, the next card from the progress deck is revealed, and each player applies its effects. These can be:

• Work. Each player can resolve one of the following actions (applying the effects of played cards that match the chosen type of action):
  • Play Card. The player places a card from their hand into their play area, returning the indicated amount of ore to the supply. If the card has an effect that applies when played, it activates immediately.
  • Replenish. The player receives 2 crate tokens from the supply and places them on one or two of their buildings.
  • Mine. The player receives 4 ore units from the general supply.
  • Farm. The player receives 4 food units from the general supply.
  • Research. The player draws 2 cards from the deck and adds them to their hand.
  • Perk. The player to whom the perk belongs receives the indicated benefit.
• Development/Event/Twist/Robot. The effect of the card is applied.

If the deck runs out, the entire discard pile is shuffled to reform the deck; after this, you proceed with a new turn.

If a player has to lose population, they will first lose population from their personal reserve. If they do not have enough population in their personal reserve, they must discard a building card they have played, take as much population from the supply as indicated by the building, and continue returning population tokens until the event requirement is met.

If cards are added to the deck during the turn, they are placed on top of it (they will be the next ones to be revealed). If multiple cards are added in the same turn, they are shuffled together before being placed on top of the deck.

Game End

The game ends when the endgame event is revealed, although the game can end prematurely on the turn in which one or more players have to lose population and do not have enough between population tokens and/or their buildings. Regardless of how the end of the game is triggered, the winner will be the player with the most population between tokens and buildings in their play area. In case of a tie, the victory is shared.

Variants

Solo Mode. It plays exactly the same except that in the starting progress deck, there is an additional card that makes the player lose or gain population according to some symbols that appear on the bottom banner of the building cards they have constructed. The goal is to manage to reach the last event without the colony collapsing.

Personal Opinion

Since today’s game is set in space, I’m going to start by talking about comets. Those celestial bodies that travel along a highly eccentric orbit around the sun and, very occasionally, pass close enough to Earth to be visible to the naked eye. Seeing one is something exceptional, and many people go through this life without ever having the opportunity to witness it.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but with Donald X. Vaccarino, something similar happens. A board game designer that practically everyone with a minimum background knows, because we usually refer to him as the person responsible for the last great mechanic invented, that is, deck-building, introduced in Dominion (here is its tocho-review).

Good old Donald deserves a monument for the simple fact of having designed this system which, subsequently, has been included in numerous games that, at the time of writing this tocho-review, are world references, such as Dune: Imperium (here is its tocho-review), Lost Ruins of Arnak (here is its tocho-review) or Clank! (here is its tocho-review).

He doesn’t release games often, but when he does, he usually leaves no one indifferent. Much was said back in the day about his Kingdom Builder (here is its tocho-review), a design that perhaps didn’t have the desired initial reception, but time has ended up putting it in its place, being another of his great works. And the last game that managed to generate certain expectations was Temporum, but it was published by a Rio Grande Games that had already gone many years without hitting the mark, and it passed without pain or glory (although it is a game very much in Vaccarino’s style).

Now, more than ten years later, Moon Colony Bloodbath arrives, with a title that evokes B-movies and an aesthetic that brings back the fifties/sixties. And the game transports us to an alternate history in which humanity has managed to establish bases on the Moon. But of course, technology in those years wasn’t exactly highly developed, and problems won’t take long to appear.

Each player will be responsible for the development of one of these lunar stations with the goal of increasing their population or, at least, not watching it dwindle as the turns go by. For this, we are presented with a game where players will manage a hand of cards representing buildings that they will incorporate into their station. These buildings have an ore cost and already come with the necessary population to ensure their operation.

So far, it sounds like a relatively standard card-tableau development game, in which players boost effects as they accumulate cards in their play area. However, the game proposes a progress system that is, to say the least, peculiar. The game is going to be dominated by a progress deck that starts with just a few cards and will grow fatter as the turns pass. These cards are events that will affect everyone equally (with some exceptions).

Four of the cards that make up the starting deck allow players to resolve one of the five actions available during the game (obtain ore, obtain food, draw cards, obtain crates, and play a card). Two other cards simply add events, which are ordered, so they will enter each game in the exact same way. And finally, two twist cards, which will be different in each game and apply diverse effects (both positive and negative).

Of course, the fact that we have lunar stations many years before it would be “safe” gives rise to various problems. Problems that will be represented by the different events and that, as a general rule, will involve a penalty for the players. A penalty in the form of death (hence the title of the game), losing population at an ever-increasing rate, since in each cycle of the deck, two new events will have entered and accumulated with the previous ones.

A priori, from what I’ve told you, the idea behind Moon Colony Bloodbath doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? A tower defense-style dynamic where you have to try to keep as many colonists as possible in your space station by playing buildings and taking advantage of their effects either to minimize negative impacts or even to increase population through alternative means. And all this practically solo, because, except for a few specific effects, interaction between players is nonexistent.

Where is the fun then? Well, it’s hard to explain, but this game generates a dynamic that reminds me of watching a horror movie. What is known as a collective atmosphere. In your living room, even with surround sound, without distractions, watching the movie in total darkness, you might jump. But being in a cinema room with dozens of people generating tension through screams and jumps intensifies the experience in an impressive way.

Well, in Moon Colony Bloodbath, seeing how all your rivals suffer the same problems as you generates a certain satisfaction, especially if we manage to weather those events more successfully. Every time a card is revealed where people die, sighs around the table will be a constant. And also because of the order in which the cards from the progress deck are revealed, since, as the game progresses, the cards that allow players to perform actions will become spaced further apart, which gives rise to situations where an action can be practically undone by the events that occur until the player can resolve the next action.

In this way, the game behaves like a sort of group hot potato, where instead of passing it between players, everyone has their own hot potato that will be closer to exploding depending on each person’s decision-making and how these decisions fit with the effects that have been added to the deck. The idea is to hold out as best as possible until the game ends, something that will normally happen because some player’s colony fails. In this sense, it reminds me quite a bit of Ponzi Scheme (here is its tocho-review) due to this idea of holding on and trying not to be the one who ends up triggering the end of the game. It’s like enjoying a slaughter where colonists fall like flies as turns go by, and you are praying not to be the one who runs out of population.

I’m telling you it’s hard to explain, because it’s still a Race for the Galaxy-style game (here is its tocho-review) from which we remove the little interaction that Tom Lehmann’s masterpiece has, to focus on card development and trying to generate an engine that allows us to stay in the running for victory. In this sense, I have to admit that all the games I’ve been playing, despite having almost the same starting point, have played out differently thanks to the combos hidden within the cards.

And depending on the building cards that each player incorporates into their colony, they will tend to resolve certain actions over others. For example, if we have a card played that allows us to use food as ore and a card that powers up the farm action, providing us with more food than indicated in the basic action, then it’s expected that we will barely resolve the mining action and focus on farming for many of our actions. And the same goes for crates, population, or ore.

I can understand why Vaccarino didn’t want to introduce many elements of interaction because the deck is already quite punitive against the players, but it’s true that one misses some element that allows players to throw a wrench in each other’s plans. In the games I’ve played so far, I’ve only encountered one event that forces players to pass a card from their hand to a neighbor (everyone in the same direction). Surely there will be some similar ones regarding resources, but, again, very occasionally.

Obviously, this makes the game scale wonderfully, because it doesn’t matter how many players are at the table. The game is going to last more or less the same number of turns, and its duration will remain constant, whether played at two or five. It is true that, due to what was mentioned before, it is most fun at five players, since suffering along with four other rivals amplifies the sensations. The more people there are groaning, the better. But as I said, at a mechanical level, it works exactly the same with any player count.

In terms of replayability, it is well served, because games are relatively short (it’s rare for it to reach the one-hour mark), they are fun, and, most importantly, there is a significant amount of cards that ensure very diverse games. And I take expansions for granted over the coming years, because I don’t believe Vaccarino presented this game as is to the publisher. Let’s remember that when Vaccarino presented the prototype of Dominion to Rio Grande Games, it contained practically five hundred different cards. He has had more than ten years since Temporum. If the game lands on its feet, we are going to have expansions until doomsday. I can imagine the most eccentric cards, including housewives dressed in flamenco outfits cooking in the lunar station’s kitchen.

Let’s move on to production. Here we find qualities typical of Rio Grande Games, meaning cards with a somewhat light paper weight, good snap, and smooth texture (sleeving is practically mandatory because the cards are handled and shuffled a lot). The cardboard components have an adequate thickness and density, and they punch out easily. The rulebook is structured in a strange way. It’s not that it isn’t understood well, but it is difficult to detect the game flow with a simple read, although it’s true this is more a consequence of its quirks than anything else.

At a visual level, we have a classic like Franz Vohwinkel with illustrations that fit the game perfectly. It is not pretty, and it might even cause some aversion. But it is what the game asks for. I especially love the illustrations of the robots, which all look like they have the best intentions, but in the end, they are absolute meat grinders. I also like the detail that small jokes have been slipped into the events and robots, making them fun to read.

And let’s wrap this up. Moon Colony Bloodbath is one of those crazy ideas of Vaccarino’s that, on paper, shouldn’t work, but they do. It is a tremendously luck-driven game, entirely multiplayer solitaire, with a game progress system that results in most turns being reactive (usually losing population). However, and I find it hard to pinpoint why, it is very fun. It’s a sort of endurance race in which players try to maintain the largest amount of population for as long as possible until one of their rivals ends up giving in (reaching the final event is incredibly difficult). In between, players try to leverage combos while crossing their fingers that events occur at relatively suitable times. I don’t think it’s a game for everyone, but I do believe it achieves what it sets out to do. For all these reasons, I give it a…