Lunar Rush, from Dead Alive Games in 2023, is a 1–4 player tightly constrained, worker placement, economic game, in which you travel to the moon to mine and create valuable resources and return to Earth to sell them.
The game is returning in 2026, along with a new expansion, in a new Kickstarter campaign—fully-funded in just 8 hours, which must be rather pleasing for the creators.
The expansion, Lunar Rush: Innovations ‘brings bold new twists to the game, expanding the original game’s strategic options and making every decision more exciting than ever. […] This major expansion introduces asymmetric corporations, each with unique abilities and play styles that will shape how you bid for routes, manage resources, and compete for profits.’
But first, let’s take a quick look at the original game…
Playing Lunar Rush
The particularly innovative feature of this game is how you get your cargo to and from the moon. There are slow, medium and fast routes in either direction; fast routes get to their destination in the current turn, medium insert a single turn delay, and slow two turns. Additionally, goods on ships using faster Earth-bound routes will get to market sooner than those on slow routes, thus commanding higher prices. However, ships on slow routes can carry significantly more cargo, so plenty of mental energy will be consumed in working out what to transport and how to maximise profits.
Route selection ties into an interesting bidding mechanism: at the start of each of the game’s 7 turns of the game, players bid for chances to grab routes, with the cost of the bid being scaled by a multiplier that increases as the game progresses—winning the bid for the last few ship runs of the game could be very expensive.
After bidding has been resolved, players fill their moon-bound ships with cargo and astronauts, then send them along the selected routes. Next, ships which have reached the moon unload and the worker placement, manufacturing and module upgrade phase happens: standard Euro-game fare. At the end of this step, you need to make sure you have enough resources to support all your astronauts, otherwise they die and are removed from the game, also costing you a score penalty. You can, however, place one astronaut on an Earth-bound ship and save them that way. Along with astronauts, this is the time to load the fruits of your labours onto ships from the moon and head back home to make some money. There are separate markets for the different types of material, and prices are higher for the first person to sell than for later sellers. The pricing profiles come in several variants, one of which selected at the start of the game.
Lunar Rush offers a clever automa mechanism allowing for 1 or 2 ‘AI’ players to be added to the game, which also allows for solo play.
The base game includes a few ‘mini-expansions’ which can be used independently or in combination to add variety to the game: Factions and Challenges add a little player asymmetry, and Moon Wonders lets you sell some products on the moon rather than having to transport them back to Earth. This modular mechanism is a nice way to make the game tuneable to groups with different skill levels, and can be used to handicap more experienced players within a group of lower experienced folk.
Note that with the extended asymmetric play in the new expansion, it’s recommended to ignore the base game factions and many of the challenges.
Adding Innovations
As indicated above, Lunar Rush: Innovations takes the idea of Factions much further, offering much more asymmetry. For example, one corporation, CasCore, uses cyborgs which can produce more products on the moon than normal humans, but require more life support resources to survive there, while NEURO employs robots, which have practically no life support requirements (consuming energy resources instead), but they’re not as efficient as humans. MinerÍnca sticks with human astronauts, though they’re costly specialists: highly skilled and efficient, but requiring careful management. I like the sound of Cullen Ventures, where you throw caution to the wind, relying on the luck of dice rolls for many actions—high risk, but high reward. And finally, Shui Guo leans into the idea of research, gaining science tokens as the game progresses, trading those in for research breakthroughs which provide a range of ongoing advantages.
The other changes are smaller, but still interesting. Perhaps taking a leaf out of Terraforming Mars’ playbook, Innovations adds milestones and awards as well as randomly selected events affecting all players (shades of Turmoil perhaps, or part of it anyway?). You get to see what the event is for 2 turns before it takes effect, so you have time to prepare for whatever will occur.
On the topic of all players, the expansion also enables a fifth player. An additional route to and from the moon is provided to support this, but it’s implemented as a pair of rather ugly boards to place alongside the main one rather than being part of the main map—it might have been nicer to provide a whole new board for the combined game, though I guess that would have been too expensive.
Campaign
The game’s Kickstarter campaign is polished, containing plenty of details about the game and expansion, with loads of third party videos, as well as links to rulebooks (both Lunar Rush and Innovations) and a Tabletop Simulator mod (base game only).
As well as the usual standard and deluxe (dual-layer boards, upgraded tokens) versions, you can get a fancy pants ‘big box’ with natty little trays to store and organise the game and expansion together. There’s also a nice neoprene mat, but unfortunately this is for the base game only, not the additions for 5 players, which seems a bit of an oversight. If you’re feeling flush and have way too much money to spend, you can get hold of a limited edition ‘L.P. Moonie’ plushie, not to mention a rocket enamel pin…. Right… Well. Moving on… Shiny replacements are available for some of the cards in the game, too, which is a bit more reasonable. The top of the range pledge level includes a couple of additional card games, Lunar Skyline and Kittens in Space; I’m not sure why they’re being bundled—perhaps Dead Alive Games just wants to shift some boxes!
I reckon they should have stopped with the standard and deluxe versions of the game and expansion, maybe the big box at a push, but the rest… No thanks.
Incidentally, the only standard version available via the Kickstarter campaign is the Innovations expansion—should you want it, you have to find the standard base game elsewhere. The bundles are for deluxified versions only, and those are unlikely to be available elsewhere.
Final Words
Lunar Rush is already a cool space game, though could start to feel dull after a handful of plays—even Factions and Challenges can take you only so far. Innovations adds an enormous heap of novelty, with its extended asymmetric corporations and events.
However, is this a Kickstarter to dive into? The standard version of the game and expansion is well made and the upgrades to deluxe are relatively modest (and not hugely expensive, but shipping and taxes would need to be taken into account), though it’s a real shame that the neoprene mat is only for the base game. The decision boils down to whether you like exclusivity and nicely printed tokens. Or a plushie… Personally, the standard editions are good enough for me, and I’ll wait for retail. If you’ve not come across Lunar Rush before, a small advantage of the retail route is that you can get the base game right now, and then decide if the expansion is worth it later on (hint: it probably is).
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
