Moon Colony Bloodbath

I’ll say upfront this one’s still pretty under the radar, low ratings count, no BGG rank yet, the kind of release that’s easy to miss unless you already track its designer closely. I bought in mostly on the strength of the name on the box, and the campy moon-colony pulp theme sealed it, retro rocket ships and domed cities and flavor text that knows exactly how silly it’s being.

The actual game is a shared deck of developments that everyone draws from and everyone can poison, and the poison only ramps up as the session goes. It starts delightful, you’re building out your little colony, everything’s fine, and then the deck starts filling with the exact kind of trouble the title promises, and you watch things spiral in a way that reminded me of Galaxy Trucker’s particular flavor of dread, you can see the wheels coming off and there’s not much you can actually do to stop it. The person who fails the least badly wins, which is a genuinely different feeling than most competitive card games chase.

Solo is fine, a decent way to learn the deck and see what kind of trouble is in there, but it’s clearly the multiplayer table where this earns its keep. With other people at the table actively choosing to make the shared poison worse for everyone, including themselves, there’s a real mean streak to it that solo play just can’t replicate, and the sessions run fast enough that a bad spiral doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It leans multiplayer-solitaire in the sense that you’re mostly managing your own colony rather than directly interacting turn to turn, but the shared deck means everyone’s choices are quietly shaping everyone else’s disaster in the background, which is a smarter version of that structure than most games manage. Not a beauty contest, the rulebook art alone had me half convinced to skip it, but as a fast, funny, slightly mean card game about watching a plan fall apart in real time, it delivered more than I expected from something this quiet.