Review: High Moon

Introduction & Overview

In Death Valley, the best time to take your skeletal cows out to pasture is on full moon nights, when dark magic reigns across the desert. You will step into the shoes of a spectral rancher (if specters even have skin, that is), whose goal is to establish cattle routes to supply the region’s main distilleries, where the finest alcohol-free spirits made from bovine ectoplasm are crafted.

This is the premise of High Moon, the first published design by Antonio Guillamó “Guilla”. Released for the first time in 2025 by Combo Games in a trilingual Spanish, French, and English edition following a crowdfunding campaign on Verkami. The illustrations were created by Pablo Sanz (1212 Las Navas de Tolosa).

The game is completely language independent (with the exception of the rulebook). It supports 1 to 4 players, with a suggested minimum age of 10 and an approximate playing time of 40 to 60 minutes. The MSRP is €25. For this review, we used a copy of the Spanish, French, and English version provided by Combo Games, which the publisher kindly supplied as a review copy.

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 18×15×4.5 cm (a small rectangular box similar to The Resistance: Avalon), we find the following components:

• 50 Standard Cards (63×88 mm):
  • 32 Map Cards
  • 12 Scoring Criteria Cards
  • 4 Player Aid Cards
  • 2 Starting Cards
• 120 Cow/Ranch Tokens (30 of each color) (cardboard)
• 12 Tombstone Markers (3 of each color) (cardboard)
• 15 Distillery Tiles (cardboard)
• 24 Bottle Tiles (cardboard)
• 12 Double and Triple Bottle Tiles (cardboard)
• 4 Scoring Markers (1 of each color) (cardboard)
• 4 +40/+80 Points Tokens (cardboard)
• Scoring Board (cardboard)
• Tombstone Board (cardboard)
• Rulebook

How to Play

High Moon is a game set in Death Valley, where each player assumes the role of a spectral rancher attempting to establish cattle routes to supply bovine ectoplasm to local distilleries. The game unfolds over a series of turns in which players play the top card of their personal deck. On each turn, the active player must place the top card of their deck onto the shared map, partially overlapping existing cards. If ranch spaces are covered, players retrieve tokens from their supply (the quantity depending on who owns the covered space). Next, the player may establish ranches or place cow tokens orthogonally adjacent to expand their routes, keeping in mind that adding multiple tokens in a single turn incurs an increasing token cost. Connecting a ranch to a distillery for the first time awards a spirit bottle, which provides a single-use special action during the game. Placing tokens over tombstone icons advances the player along the corresponding track. Alternatively, a player may pass to retrieve tokens from their supply. The game ends when all players have played every card in their respective decks, at which point players score immediate and end-game objective cards, bottle combinations matched with tombstone track positions, bonuses for the least advanced tombstone marker, and remaining resources. The player with the most victory points claims victory.

Key Concepts

Let’s begin with the Map Cards, which form the core structure of the game board. Each card is divided into twelve spaces showing various elements such as colored ranches, different types of tombstones, or distillery spaces. On each turn, players must place the top card of their personal deck partially overlapping the expanding map, respecting orientation rules (though 180-degree rotation is allowed) and avoiding placing cards over existing tokens or tiles. When overlapping ranch spaces with a new card, players gain cow/ranch tokens from their supply depending on who owns the covered space.

Distillery Tiles are square double-sided tiles displaying a question mark on the back and a specific type of spirit on the front. At the start of the game and whenever a card with a distillery space is played, one of these tiles is placed randomly to reveal the spirit it produces. These tiles act as destination points that players must connect from their ranches via cattle routes to earn rewards, and routes can pass through them on any side to continue building.

On their turn, players can deploy their Cow/Ranch Tokens onto map cards. These are circular double-sided tokens used to construct network connections. On their ranch side, they are used to establish a starting point on visible ranch spaces of the player’s color. On their cow side, they extend paths by occupying vacant spaces orthogonally adjacent to existing friendly tokens or connected distilleries. To place multiple tokens in a single turn, the player must pay an increasing cost by discarding tokens back to their personal supply. A route is defined as a ranch token connected to a distillery, either directly or through a chain of cow tokens.

This progressive cost structure is tracked on the Player Aid Cards. These show designated spaces to track turn actions, serving as a temporary placement area for discarded tokens paid when placing multiple pieces on the map. They also feature a dedicated slot for holding a bottle used during the current turn, indicating that no further bottles may be used that turn.

Bottle Tiles represent various spirits (spider, bat, and raven) in single, double, or triple values, showing a full bottle side and an empty bottle side. They are awarded immediately when a player connects one of their ranches to a matching distillery for the first time. During their turn, a player may consume a bottle to execute a special action (such as gaining extra tokens or placing additional tokens at no placement cost) by flipping it to its empty side. At game end, they award points based on multipliers on the tombstone board, as well as bonus points for unconsumed bottles.

The Tombstone Board features three tracks corresponding to three distinct symbols (spider, bat, and raven), along which players advance their Tombstone Markers. Whenever a player places a cow token over a tombstone space on the map, they advance their marker on the matching track (potentially triggering bonus effects). At the end of the game, the heights reached on these tracks determine the scoring multiplier for collected bottles and provide additional points based on the position of the player’s lowest marker.

Scoring Criteria Cards outline goals that award victory points during or at the end of the game. At setup, three cards are revealed (displaying up to four active criteria) that establish specific conditions based on map layout, route length or structure, or token discards. These fall into two categories: immediate criteria evaluated during the turn they are completed, and end-game criteria scored based on completed conditions at the end of the game.

Finally, we have the Scoring Board featuring a numbered track where players place their Scoring Markers to track point progression throughout the game. It keeps a visible record of immediate points gained from criteria cards triggered mid-game. After tallying final criteria points, tombstone multipliers, lowest-marker bonuses, and leftover resources at game end, final positions on this board determine the winner.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Form a supply with distillery tiles randomly face down on their question mark side, removing one of each type in 2-player and 3-player games.
2. Place full spirit bottles within reach of all players.
3. Place the two starting cards in the center of the table overlapping as indicated, drawing 2 distillery tiles from the supply to place randomly face up on each distillery space.
4. Shuffle the scoring criteria cards and display 3 face up, overlapping one card over half of the other two to define the 4 active criteria for the game.
5. Set the tombstone board and scoring board to one side of the play area.
6. Each player chooses a color and receives:
   • One player aid card.
   • A personal deck of cards (8 cards in a 2-player game, 7 cards in a 3-player game after removing the card with icon 2, or 6 cards in a 4-player game after removing cards with icons 2 and 2-3), which they shuffle and place face down. Each player draws their top card into their hand.
   • A set of 30 cow/ranch tokens placed in their personal supply, drawing 3 tokens for their first turn.
   • Three tombstone markers placed on the lowest space of each track on the tombstone board.
   • One scoring marker (placed on the starting space of the scoring board).
   • One +40/+80 point token.
7. Randomly choose a starting player.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of High Moon spans a fixed number of rounds (8/7/6 rounds in 2/3/4-player games). In each round, starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, every player takes one turn.

On their turn, the active player proceeds as follows:

• Place Card (Mandatory). The player must place the card from their hand onto the central map according to the following rules:
  • It must match the orientation of the starting cards (it may be rotated 180°, but never placed perpendicularly).
  • It must cover at least one space on the existing map.
  • At least one space of the newly placed card must not overlap existing cards beneath it (an entire card section cannot be completely covered).
  • Cards cannot be placed over any tokens or tiles currently on the map.
  • If the played card shows a distillery space, draw a random distillery tile from the supply and place it face up on that space.
  • For each of their own color’s ranch spaces covered, the active player gains 3 tokens from their supply.
  • For each opponent’s ranch space covered, the active player gains 1 token from their supply, while the owner of that color gains 2 tokens from theirs.
• Place Tokens or Pass. The active player chooses whether to expand routes or gain tokens:
  • Place Tokens. The player may place as many available tokens from near their player aid as they wish and can afford. The first token placed incurs no cost, but placing a second requires discarding 1 token to the player aid, the third requires discarding 2 tokens, and so on. Token placement options are:
    • Place a Ranch. Placed on its ranch side onto a visible, uncovered ranch space of the player’s color to establish it.
    • Place a Cow. Placed on its cow side onto an empty space orthogonally adjacent to any existing friendly token or adjacent to a distillery connected to a friendly route.
    • Connect to a Distillery. When a connection between a friendly ranch and a specific distillery is established for the first time (adjacently or via cows), the player immediately gains a bottle of the corresponding spirit type. Connecting additional ranches to an already connected distillery yields no extra bottles.
  • Pass. Instead of placing tokens or using bottles, the player may pass to draw 3 tokens directly from their supply for use on their next turn.

Afterward, the active player clears their player aid card by returning discarded tokens to their supply and saving used bottle tiles for end-game scoring, draws the next card from their personal deck, and turn order passes to the next player.

At any point during their turn, a player may use one spirit bottle (maximum one bottle per turn) by flipping it to its used side and placing it on their player aid card to trigger its ability:

• Spider Spirit: Grants up to 3 tokens from personal supply.
• Bat Spirit: Allows placing up to 2 available tokens on the map without paying placement discard costs.
• Raven Spirit: Allows placing 1 token directly from personal supply onto the map without paying placement discard costs.

If an immediate scoring criterion was set up, a player completing its requirements scores the indicated victory points immediately during their turn.

Game End

The game ends after the final round, moving to end-game scoring where players tally points from:

• Victory points from criteria cards based on fulfilled conditions. Note that to score, a route must contain at least one ranch and one distillery, and a ranch must be connected to at least one distillery.
• Multiplying the total quantity of each spirit bottle collected (used or unused) by the level reached on that matching spirit’s tombstone track.
• Victory points indicated by the position of their lowest tombstone marker on the tombstone board.
• 1 victory point for every 2 unused elements combined between cow/ranch tokens and unused spirit bottles.

The player with the most points wins. In case of a tie, the tied player with the most remaining tokens in their supply wins. If still tied, victory is shared.

Variants

Solo Mode. The player faces off against the Scary Cooper automa, who always takes the first turn and aims to construct the largest network of ranches and distilleries. Choose one of the specific solo mode setups listed in the rulebook. On its turn, Scary Cooper does not use the tombstone board, collect bottles, or pay costs to place tokens. Instead, it gains a fixed 3 tokens (plus any retained tokens) and plays a card from its deck prioritizing expanding its main route or blocking the human player. Next, it places free tokens to link structures or cover key tombstone spaces. The human player takes turns using normal rules, gaining 2 tokens whenever Scary Cooper covers one of their ranch spaces. At game end, the automa scores 2 points per ranch and distillery in its primary route, 1 point per structure in secondary routes, plus fixed difficulty bonus points for the selected scenario. If the player exceeds Scary Cooper’s total score, they claim victory.

Personal Opinion

I am really excited to write this opinion section because we are looking at the first published design by a fellow community member who has been working on his prototypes for quite some time. Most of you who know him probably do so through his role as a content creator on the *Victoria Compartida* podcast, but today it is time to talk about his work as a designer.

I am referring to the good old Guilla (whose official ID says his real name is Antonio Guillamó). And those of you who follow him surely know that his favorite game of all time is Kingdom Builder (here is his tocho-review), which has a rather peculiar origin story.

It has been a long time since then, but back in 2011, when Kingdom Builder was introduced at Essen, expectations for Donald X. Vaccarino’s next design were sky-high following the gaming shockwave created by Dominion (here is its tocho-review), a design that brought us the last great major mechanic invented: deck-building.

However, when Kingdom Builder hit store shelves, reception was noticeably colder than expected. While the deck-building pioneer captivated players with its endless variety and smooth gameplay, its successor threw many off due to a high level of abstraction and an area control system tightly constrained by the luck of drawing terrain cards.

But as is usually the case, time put everything in its proper place, allowing players to discover its subtle strategic depth alongside immense replayability expanded by numerous subsequent expansions. Still, that initial reception left a lingering sense of mild disappointment among gamers.

Why tell you all this when we should be talking about Guilla’s debut published design? Because I believe establishing this context is essential to understanding what the designer offers us in **High Moon**, which we will analyze shortly. But first, thanks are due to Combo Games for providing the review copy that makes this lengthy write-up possible.

High Moon transports us to Death Valley wrapped in a rather peculiar, spooky atmosphere, asking us to manage herds of skeletal cows and connect routes to bovine ectoplasm spirit distilleries. It is a whimsical, lighthearted theme that replaces the original prototype’s setting focused on power grid connections.

Mechanically, High Moon plays over a fixed number of rounds where each player’s main objective is to expand territory and connect cattle routes from their ranches to various distilleries. On each turn, the active player must overlap a card from their hand onto the existing map.

This card placement not only alters the geography but also generates cow tokens when covering spaces that serve as unestablished ranch spots (covering your own potential ranch space yields more tokens than covering an opponent’s space, which also grants the opponent compensation tokens).

After card placement, players can spend these tokens to establish ranches (placing a token on a matching color ranch space) or build routes connecting ranches to distilleries by placing cow tokens on orthogonally adjacent empty spaces.

However, token resource management is quite tight: while the first token placed each turn is free, placing additional tokens within the same turn incurs an exponentially scaling discard cost. Players must carefully weigh whether to push hard on a single turn or wait for the next turn when placement costs reset.

Upon completing a first route to a distillery, the player receives a spirit bottle that grants special abilities related to token management when used, with the restriction that only one bottle can be consumed per turn.

As a solid eurogame, the ultimate goal is accumulating as many victory points as possible through two main avenues. On one hand, scoring criteria cards outline specific short-term or long-term goals, rewarding everything from route lengths to triggering specific map arrangements at precise moments.

When playing with immediate scoring criteria, knowing when to step on the gas to claim points is crucial, as a single turn’s delay can prove costly. The longer you take to complete these objectives, the fewer points they yield.

More commonly, end-game scoring criteria will dictate core strategy throughout the match, guiding both card placement and token deployment as players build routes to newly placed distilleries.

On the other hand, collecting spirit bottles not only offers valuable tactical benefits during turns but also serves as a major scoring engine when combined with the tombstone board. Covering tombstone spaces on the map with cow tokens advances markers on tracks that act as scoring multipliers for each bottle type collected. Additionally, the position of a player’s lowest marker on this board grants a substantial endgame point bonus.

And that’s really all there is to it. I think this gives enough context if you were unfamiliar with the game, so let’s move on to gameplay feel and dynamics. To start, we must address the constant resource tension created by card placement on the map. Because token supplies do not regenerate passively—there is no fixed income at the start of a turn—covering ranch spaces becomes the primary economic engine needed to power your actions.

Covering a ranch of your own color provides a generous reward that breathes life into your hand, but real psychological friction arises when you are forced to step on an opponent’s ranch. That smaller token payout for you, combined with the collateral benefit granted to your opponent, forces you to evaluate whether the move is worth boosting their upcoming turn.

This overlapping mechanism turns the board into a constantly evolving entity where geography shifts continuously. It is not enough to plan the most efficient expansion toward a distillery; you must constantly reevaluate which spaces you sacrifice and which you leave exposed to opponents. Leaving a tempting ranch open might lure an opponent into covering it, handing you bonus tokens, but it could also bury a vital connection path you needed to keep open. This subtle read of mutual needs and the struggle to avoid running dry on tokens gives every card placement a very engaging tactical layer.

Another interesting mechanic is the bottle system. Few moments in High Moon feel as satisfying as triggering a spirit bottle at just the right time to launch an explosive turn. In a design where additional token placement costs scale brutally, having access to these action boosts feels like an oxygen tank. It is that moment where you manage to stretch a route further than expected, cover a crucial tombstone space, or reach a contested distillery, squeezing every drop out of your turn to pull off a brilliant play.

One of the key points with the highest amount of indirect interaction in High Moon stems from the race to reach the distilleries before your rivals do. As space on the modular board shrinks when cards overlap, the access routes to these key tiles become real bottlenecks. Aggressively plotting a cattle route not only serves to secure your own liquor bottle, but also to block other players’ progression and force your opponents to take costly detours in tokens. This competition to enclose the distilleries gives games a constant, highly stimulating edge of tension.

It is undeniable that High Moon draws from the essence of great tile-placement and spatial control classics, with the aforementioned Kingdom Builder being its most obvious benchmark. From Vaccarino’s title, it inherits that feel of building connected routes across a map (in this case, a dynamic one) while chasing variable scoring criteria that completely shape the strategy of the game. Not to mention the blockades that constantly happen. However, instead of relying on the luck of a terrain deck to restrict your movements, here that limitation is shifted to the scaling cost of placing tokens, forcing you to carefully manage hand economy to keep up the pace of expansion.

We could also point to Mykerinos as a potential touchstone (Guilla is very fond of Egyptian-themed games, though I don’t recall him mentioning this specific title), given that players deploy colored tokens onto a grid-like board made of cards (even though players don’t place those cards themselves), expanding across empty spaces orthogonally adjacent to previously occupied spots. Beyond that, the rest of the game branches into different directions, making further comparisons tricky.

Turning to less positive aspects, I would highlight the impact of card luck. There are turns where the card you draw simply fits poorly into the central map layout, either because it doesn’t yield many tokens or because the spaces it leaves exposed benefit opponents far more than yourself. When this happens, it can spark a moment of mild frustration.

I am also not particularly fond of distilleries being revealed randomly, which can lead to games where securing a specific bottle type becomes tricky. Granted, the total number of bottles you can activate during a game is capped by turn count, but there will be times a player feels luck wasn’t on their side because card placements prevented them from reaching a key distillery.

I know player choices drive much of this, but card draw order remains highly influential. I wonder if during development keeping a full hand of cards—or at least a small draft hand—was considered to give players more choice. Since all cards must eventually be played, deciding their order (within reasonable limits) could have added an interesting layer of control.

Along these lines, I feel the game doesn’t scale as smoothly as one might hope. It certainly functions across player counts, but at two players there is noticeably tighter control and luck has less of a dampening impact, leaving a better overall impression. This is especially true because players get two additional turns compared to four-player games, where interaction becomes far sharper and coordinated opponent plays can leave a player thoroughly stranded.

Moving on to production values, components are of decent quality, featuring cards with good stock, smooth texture, and nice snap (sleeving is not recommended, as it hinders card overlapping on the board) alongside thick, well-punched cardboard tokens that punch out cleanly. The rulebook is well structured and leaves no ambiguity.

Now for the visual presentation, which is likely the area with the most room for improvement. The game features a retro aesthetic that looks reminiscent of early digital artwork from two decades ago, falling well short of modern board game standards. The cover suffers from a clumsy composition where the main character art displays flat anatomy, rigid rendering, and a shadow palette that feels unappealing by contemporary standards. Both the green rider on horseback and the stampeding cattle skeletons feature character designs so dated that they detract from table presence. While terrain cards maintain a clean, functional style for icon clarity, the overall art direction—dominated by outdated fonts and rudimentary vector finishes—gives the impression of a game from a bygone era in need of a modern, professional polish.

And let’s wrap this up. High Moon delivers a dynamic route-building and spatial development experience powered by a brilliant card-overlapping mechanic that acts simultaneously as geography and economic engine. The constant tension of balancing resource gain against opponent concessions, combined with the rewarding puzzle of chaining actions to maximize spirit bottles, produces turns packed with tactical depth. Although luck in card draw order and distillery reveals can occasionally cause minor frustration on sub-optimal turns, its tight runtime keeps gameplay engaging throughout. It is heavily dragged down by a visual style that feels stuck in the past, back when graphic design received far less editorial attention. For all these reasons, I give it a…