Recent reviews I have posted have reignited a couple of passions I have in this hobby, which if you have been reading along with me you may already be able to guess: Games by IV Studios, and deck builders.
So it might come as little surprise that I decided to revisit recently the game which started it all for IV Studios, and also the deck builder which first lured me into the genre: Moonrakers.
I will try to give any of you who aren’t already familiar a bit of a flavour for this game, but also, given we are now several years on from the original release and 3 main expansions (and several more mini packs) later, a little bit of a buyers guide if you are looking at whether you should dip your toes into this space outlaw world.
The Base Game
Almost everyone has seen those characters in Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy and imagined their own outlaw space pirate moments. Even more can imagine the scene of the Brethren Court in Pirates of the Caribbean. These are the fantasies this game is trying to evoke, and to a large extent it succeeds.
Players all begin the same, low reputation captains of their own ship, limited resources and in search of opportunities. You will have a lofty goal, to lead the Moonrakers by being the most prestigious outlaw.
But it’s likely that you can’t succeed alone as you make your way through the opportunities in front of you. You will have to negotiate with your fellow captains (the other players) to work together to earn rewards, be that money, prestige (Victory Points) or even new crew or ship parts (additional abilities or cards for your growing deck). Those players won’t work for free, and they might not always be willing to help, or could even be looking to sabotage the mission.
These negotiations are the backbone of the game, and encourage relatively free-form player interaction to reach agreement on who will take their share of the risks and rewards of each mission on every turn.
The deck building itself is formed around actions to meet mission objectives, but these symbols are duplicated with actions themselves. Drawing cards, blocking or dealing damage, energy to play more cards before your turn ends. If you meet those goals then everyone gets what they agreed to. If you fail, no one will get anything.
The base game is everything you need to get started, and works perfectly well without any of the expansion content, but its smaller amounts of cards can make the game slightly more repetitive a lot more quickly, especially if you regularly play with the same group of players. There are a number of ways to specialise your ship in ways to synergise with the available missions, and if players specialise in different ways it can be a lot of fun to see these strategies play out as well, but the wilder ideas are held within the expanded content:
Overload
Moonrakers: Overload in my opinion is one of those expansions that I am not sure I would want to play without now that I own it. This expansion almost doubles the number of crew and ship part cards in the mix, adds additional core action card types (which can all be bought with your hard earned credits) and two new mission types (including missions to allow all players to compete against each other to earn all of the spoils of that mission).
The crew and ship parts merge in seamlessly to the base game with little new rules to understand, with the exception of a new IO sphere token currency which is used to generate new powerful abilities, and the upgraded action cards which use the existing rule set to combine previously available actions into a single card (want to have more actions and draw cards in one play? Yes please)
This expansion is a no brainer in my eyes and should be the first of the expansions you try once you have the main game understood, or even start with it included if you have the Titan Box (more on that later)
Binding Ties
Moonrakers: Binding Ties is something I wish had been in the base game to begin with. The only problem with a negotiation game is sometimes players need an incentive to start working together. Binding ties provides this by adding a reputation points system for each players. Succeed together and you gain a reputation point for each player you worked with. Fail together and you all lose points. Spend those points on rewards including prestige, cards, effects, credits. It’s that simple, but it drives the right behaviours, particularly when you have players not wanting to make a mistake and give up that last point to an opponent so they win the game, or when you need to get a mission handled alone in order to catch up.
Nomad
Moonrakers: Nomad is the games biggest and possibly most divisive expansion. The additions provided make for the biggest gameplay changes by completely eliminating and replacing the way in which players choose missions. Rather than take from a randomly drawn board of mission cards, Nomad provides a map which players can freely move around in, in order to select missions filtered on their preferred action objectives. Have a deck suited to high shields and damage, spend your time in the green and orange regions.
This allows players to hone in on their preferred strategy of building their deck and ship parts to suit their needs, but it also adds restrictions on who you can ally with on any given turn.
Personally this is the expansion I would suggest could be a wait and see purchase. Once you understand the game in its raw form, Nomad can be a fun way to shake things up, but for a beginner it could actually make it less accessible for early game ships to be successful.
Mini Expansions (Shard, Marauders, Starfall, The Endless, Dark Matter to name a few)
These small packs come in varying sizes from 10 to 25 cards and generally are made either to promote the other IV products (with the Endless and Starfall packs themed around characters in Veiled Fate and Fractured Sky respectively) or alternatively to introduce a series of more experimental game concepts which introduce a new strategy or several into the potential mix of the base game.
Moonrakers Dark Matter, for instance is focused on a new namesake resource which the new ship parts and crew members can harness, generate and interact with in various ways. This adds another dimension to your deck which can either clog up your deck with additional seemingly useless cards, or instead be traded for powerful new effects.
In each pack there is a combination of ship parts, crew members and even some new mission varieties. I find these additions for their small price point to be a very fun way of adding to a game I already love, ranking some of these twists on gameplay as highly as some of my favourites from both the base game and the core expansions as well.
The Titan Package
If all of the above sounds like the kind of game you would love to play, then IV studios do offer a premium solution: Titan. This comes in a suitably enormous box which houses the base game and all three core expansions in a single package, but it is at a hefty price, so you would need to be sure you will love the game to justify the purchase I think. Having said that, as someone who does love the game but bought everything individually over time, I definitely wish I could get hold of the larger box alone for it’s storage solution, as everything fits neatly into the Titan box reducing setup time down to almost nothing more than opening the board onto the table.
Overall
Moonrakers is a game which feels like very few others in my collection. It is high player interaction, simple to teach and grasp, and thoroughly addictive. The production values and art quality have become a staple of this studio’s products and it is a treat to replay time and again the one which started their rise.
If I had one complaint to make it would be that although it can be played solo or with two players, the solution of the mercenary deck (allowing you to spend some of the rewards to gain a temporary card from a panel of a few) doesn’t engage me enough to make it better than other game options. At higher player counts is where this game truly shines.
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