 And at review con, which is what we're calling a thing where we get together with our hardcore friends and play hardcore games We played a lot of board games. We're trying to review all of them before we forget about them Yes, and one of the games we played was entirely new to me. I'd never seen it before in my life I had never seen it, but I had never played it was appealing. It is just called Luna But apparently has an alternate name the full name is Luna in the domain of the moon princess Which I guess is definitely accurate. It's been published by a bunch of different companies, but it was the man at one point This is not a apparently very successful Game it's never became a big hit. I don't think if you asked most board game people about it only the super nerdiest would know and My shortest possible assessment of it is that I have not encountered a game that is specifically like it It combines That's it's definitely a unique game. It combines not so Amazing and to make it it's like a great game that you want to play a whole bunch, but it's also not a bad game It's not like all this poopy game. It's just like it's not super great Amazo game like say power gritters some Puerto Rico or something. Yep It's a game that I want it's very unique and therefore worth can't worth playing if you're someone who cares about board games Now you that's your TL. Dr. You can stop listening and then now we'll talk about the actual game But I would play it again because I would play it again an interesting thing about it is that Having played it once the interrelations between the purely deterministic actions of the players is More complex than one might expect. Oh, yeah, meaning Playing it again. I may take drastically different actions from the first time I played and Despite that despite that complexity the first time we played it the scores were pretty close and People develop wildly different directional heuristics that seem to converge Yeah, so first of all this game is fascinating and that it is a perfect information game. Yeah, there's no cards in your hand There's no secret. There's no deck of things flipping up. There's no nothing. It's literally just like all right everyone movie dudes Yep, move them around on these islands in a right a So worker placement game in the middle of the map in the middle of the game This is big a hex map thing Which contains the moon princesses castle the moon princess never goes there. Yeah But you can go there to pray to the moon princess And get a lot of victory points apparently and all around the moon princesses castle are these islands You know, it's funny because that middle part reminds me of the castle from Kalis in that it's the most prominent thing on the board and it seemed to be the true end game Once people are reasonably skilled. Yes all around the castle are these islands and each island has a different purpose, right? there's like an observatory and I forget what all the different islands are there's a bunch of them And they all they all do something different physically separate islands with us a token That's actually a separate little cardboard island that are you know look like islands and on each island There is a token that is specific to that island that you can basically spend an action to take and then you'll be able To use that later to do something independently of that There is a moon priestess who moves from island to island in a deterministic fashion Having more dudes on an island when she's there is worth victory points And there's also this jerk who's going around the other direction and you don't want to be on the island when he's there Mm-hmm, and you basically on your turn you allocate what if he's on the island with the moon princess Well, that was an interesting situation that caused everyone to scatter to the winds priestess princess I don't know yeah the theme like that tying the theme to the game is pretty thin Similarly to how the theme of village Seems like it fits the game mechanics, but doesn't really when you dig into it So I basically ignored the thing so the first thing about this game that you'll notice right away As soon as the rules were explained that I didn't even need to play one turn of the game to realize this is that you Get some meeples and moving them as a pain in the ass Yep, you want a huge as soon as they explain the rules I'm like goddamn it's gonna be hard to move these guys around the whole game is gonna be really About moving these guys and getting like them moved to where I need them to be So think of it kind of like when two people are having a fistfight in that if they're high-level martial arts masters The act of moving your body in a way to then punch someone is itself a telegraphing of What direction you're like what kind of thing you're about to do you got to set up moves Well in advance in a public space where everyone can see what you're setting up Yeah, so like you want to you want to move your meeple you can move it barely and it costs like a whole action And it sucks and then everyone sees what you did and goes, huh the guy the guys like spent and the meeple Can't do anything anymore because you moved it right you can move them way better if you get a boat But to get a boat you got to go to the island that has boats on it and take a boat tile And now everyone sees that you took a boat tiles You're basically really when you do that you're just delaying your action to get a better action later Now I did find that a useful heuristic was by having Amy tile in front of you kind of scared other people from committing to actions that tile could fuck up Yes, and that because so posturing became a big part of the game, which is why even though they are So different that I would not compare them otherwise And I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression from this comparison But this game shares that very strongly with Hansa, Toytannica in that the game is you can make Very incremental actions on the board at significant personal costs meaning there's a very limited number of actions you can take Yep, and the mere act of positioning something gives other players a ton of information about what you're trying to do And things that they can do now Yep, but then when someone else put something down it definitely informed So like when I see Scott still got two guys he could put out and I want to get the majority on the priestess But Scott could put the guys there You don't want to make a move if someone else still has the ability to disrupt that move you wait until your move is invincible and Unthreatened and then make it but if everyone waits that then otherwise if you commit your two movements to go See the moon frist is and then someone else commits three and now you you committed your moves and you got nothing for it Yeah, but at the same time you gotta move somewhere like you gotta do stuff You can't not do anything You can't just posture forever which you can pass and take a candle But then what happens is like sure the board can go or if no one else passes It'll come back to you and you can do something you can you don't have to keep passing you can unpass now This is what's crazy this passing mechanic, and I can't stress this enough It is very rare that when someone does something weird with a Generally agreed upon mechanic in games usually that's bad like in ground floor. Yep I kind of like this candle mechanic, but I guarantee if you're not careful you're gonna explain it wrong or do it wrong I was not Properly educated on this rule when we started and I which was your own fault because it was explained like five times But it was it's a it's a non-standard passing mechanic, which is why I serve my eyes didn't pay I got glazed over when it was being explained But basically this four or five candle tiles how many some number one two three four five Okay, I might be the number of players. I don't know But anyway if you four four four four if you pass you take a candle tile and the candle starts to burn out Right, and then you wait if the game gets a back around to you and the candle doesn't burnt out you can Obviously pass again. You could also take an action, but passing again takes another candle So it's not like most games if they have this kind of mechanic Usually usually when you pass you're out out out for the rest of the round or something No, not in this game as well as this candle you can keep going now The other alternative way that goes is people can pass and if they're not permanently out They can unpass and the other way games tend to do this is the round only ends if Everyone passes once in a row. Nope. There just needs to be the candle has to burn out One person could take all the candle pieces and that would burn it out So I pass God takes an action Chris takes an anthon action. I pass again now everyone goes oh shit, right? It's like you can basically take candle bit burn the candle out as your actions to sort of threaten people and to realize Oh shit. I might not get another action now Crap the candle has burnt this much We didn't learn that so much later in the game But knowing now what I know you keep saying we it was just you you really I understood that better the next time I play this game There's gonna be a lot of rounds or I'm just like candle. That's fine Alright go especially because if you take candle early it just it sort of puts a timer on everyone else Yeah, it makes them take an action for me to respond to instead of me taking the first action to put myself at disadvantage So there's this work replacement game which has a part of the reason why we're not getting into the specific mechanics of all these I forget them. I played the game once and it was a while ago. They're kind of immaterial to the review and There's a lot of them and they don't make sense unless we literally teach you the whole game Yeah, but basically each island has a tile the tiles can do things But you have to sort of move a guy to a place get a tile then use the tile It's very slow and you're telegraphing everything that you can or might do the main thing is the middle of the board of the hexes are I would so we say the main thing but really it's more like the end game sort of it's the goal But really the goal is victory you get these treasures by claiming them And then you put them into the middle and they're worth points And you can also bump people out of the middle that are adjacent to you by attacking that is not what the fiction is I don't care what the fiction is. Yeah, the mechanic of this is pretty unique You can also lock your guys in and prevent them from being bumped So you've got a yeah, but that's one of those tile actions. Yep so basically you've got this hex area and There is a limited number of the treasure type things where the numbers just count up There's higher and higher numbers and all deterministic and you can only but you can spend actions To claim one and spend actions to put them into the castle If someone puts a hired numbered one next to one of yours with a lower number your guy gets fucked basically Yep, he's kicked out and he goes to a special place where he can't even do normal movement He has to use one of those boats to get out. Yeah You have to use a crappy move you have to get an extra action and like use a bunch of resources to rescue That guy now because he's stuck on the dock of the castle. It's real bad Yeah, if it happens to you. Yep, but you can only take numbers so high There was a notable turn where I saw rim was in a vulnerable position And I basically was just like waiting and hoping rim would do this and then I went yeah, I did it Alright, so remember the provost in K-list that would sort of move along to sort of set boundaries for what you can do Yep, so there is there's a mechanic like the provost and then every turn this thing Moves further down this track Activating more of the treasures. Yes unlocking higher numbers of treasure I'm bringing you closer to the end game the earlier you move in you can get points for moving in But now you've got guys that are vulnerable that could be kicked out for the end of the game I'm moving in late. It's hard One of the worker things you can do is get a tile that will let you skip one level ahead of that provost yep, and All that combined makes a pretty complex mechanic that you could build an entire game around Mm-hmm, and yet this is the sub game of getting victory points within the game of doing stuff with these islands so Pretty much if I hadn't read these rules and played this game This game reeks of a game that would fail in the way that ground floor failed in that it has Multiple mechanics that are like known mechanics But are crooked in a way that is not commonly known Meaning they're easy to mess up coupled with having multiple significantly complex mechanics in the same game that are not Obviously indirectly interrelated and yet they work pretty well together. Yeah, it's it's weird There's a lot of games like this out there I remember playing a lot of them back in like the RIT days We're like these really sort of semi unique euros that have things and mechanics that are like really different from every other Kind of game like village is actually a recent example of a game that felt that way Yeah, village with the people dying and going in the there's no other game that does that right And that sort of makes me personally want to play them But it doesn't make me want to like it makes me want to play them a few times Right and then sort of like that novelty is that is the thing the game has going for it Because really the game to play is mostly kind of frustrating with all these limited actions But it's not like a super fun time, but like to call Mexico Java have that same thing What was the joke I always said the way they figure out how many actions you get in those games is to keep reducing the number by one Until a fist fight breaks out in the play testers right and then add one and leave it there But yeah, it's like it's not a super fun to play and the theme isn't that exciting Even though Moon Priest is pretty cool, right? But but it was intellectually stimulating and difficult and I enjoyed my experience such that I want to play it again I want to play it a few times, but I wouldn't want to buy it or play it a whole bunch or make it my favorite game or give it It's not like a great game that deserves awards or anything like that You know, it's just like it's totally unique weird still good thing that someone who was way into board games Should definitely check out for a you know different experience, but you know, obviously doesn't have the mass You know, I don't want to say it doesn't deserve mass market You know, I guess sales, but it doesn't have mass market sales So it has what it deserves, but it feels very I felt good about the decisions. I was making decisions I made mattered a lot most of the time. You don't get a lot of them. That's why yep But the one thing it lacks is that because it's got some fairly complex mechanics all sort of interoperating it doesn't have the sort of I don't know simplistic elegance of Hansa toy tonica, which has a very similar Reactive and posturing component So I want to play this two or three more times And it's possible that I would enjoy it beyond that But I'm not sure because I don't know if the game will lock into either a degenerate strategy among significant analysis or a Sort of very steady state like there is only one clear way to win and everyone's just racing to do it so we'll see But I liked it and I haven't played a game like it and I think you should at least if you see it at a con you should definitely take it out of the library and play it But I would not buy it site unseen. No, I definitely it's one of those games You see it in a convention library Like what the hell is that and if you ever say that about a game play it at least one time Yeah, that mermaid game in the packs library. I don't know what the hell that is, but I really want to play it one time But I guess this game it actually might have gotten called I don't know this game has a lot of meat to it more meat than you might expect and Despite having the trappings of the kinds of things that make me very wary of a game. It actually Executed on those things. Also, it's a perfect information game. So don't neglect that fact There's not a lot of perfect information games out there and the one if you want a game that has no randomness No secrets no bluffing and really you know a lot more like chess only obviously more Euro style This is one to look at because there aren't many in that category the perfect information games that have These kinds of mechanics tend to devolve very rapidly into this is the only clear path to usually they're abstract like oh She yeah, but this one. I'm really curious if after two or three more plays There is a very clear sequence to victory probably. Yeah, I don't know Other games that I have played that I would have made the same sort of question about Definitely devolve very rapidly this one at the end of our first play. I didn't have a path yet And that is notable to me because usually I find that path and I don't ever want to play the game again I actually do want to play this game again And you know us on Geek Nights wanting to play a game again is one of the highest pieces of phrase We can ever give to a game. It's like play once play more than once play forever. Those are the three levels you got This has been Geek Nights with rim and Scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew comm for show notes discussion news and More remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays anime comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays Geek Nights is distributed under a creative comments attribution 3.0 license Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience But unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night