Moon Colony Bloodbath

I bought this one blind off the designer’s name alone, which is not something I usually admit to doing but Donald X. Vaccarino has earned it at this point. Moon Colony Bloodbath is a small card game where you’re managing a crew of moon colonists who are, per the title, going to start dying, and the whole shared deck fills up with poison that everybody gets to make worse for everybody else. It’s ugly in the good way. Cheap little box, no minis, art that looks like it was drawn during a lunch break, and I mean that as a compliment because the game does not need to be anything more than this.

Setup is maybe four minutes and teardown is faster, which matters to me more than it probably should. This is a game I can get to the table on a Tuesday between two heavier things without anybody groaning about the clock.

Two players works fine, honestly plays a little meaner at two since there’s nowhere to hide, but I think it wants three or four to really show off the reverse-race feeling where everyone’s just trying not to be the first colony to go completely under. Somebody described it as feeling like Ponzi Scheme or Galaxy Trucker, that sense that things are visibly spinning out of control and you’re strapped in for the ride regardless of what you do, and that’s exactly right. You can see the deck getting worse in real time and there’s nothing to do but keep making choices that are slightly less bad than the alternative.

It teaches in about ninety seconds, which is the other reason it survives on my shelf. I don’t have to sit anybody down for a rules explanation, I just say “everybody dies eventually, try to die last” and deal the cards. Is it deep? No. Is it the funniest small box I’ve picked up this year? Also yes, and those two things aren’t in conflict as often as people think they are.