…wider than a mile, I’m rolling you in style… ahem… If you love Moonrakers (and I might be prone to eyeing you with suspicion if you don’t) but want that same kind of experience in both a smaller box and timeframe then I very much think Moonrollers is for you.
Introduction
The Moonrakers universe is vast. The original game has been supplemented by three excellent expansions as well as its shiny younger brother Brink. What is perhaps more often overlooked is this title – Moonrollers. Perhaps that’s because it’s not in a bigger, flashier box with a lot of the add-on extras and upgraded components (though we’ll talk about that shortly), or perhaps it’s something of a gem waiting to be unearthed by more people. Here we’ve got the same art style, same iconography and that all-round familiar feel for Moonrakers players, but also something that’s simple enough to understand if you’re looking at this as your route into this entire suite of games. And to top it off, it’s all wrapped up with a neat push-you-luck dice bow on top!
Let’s get ready to roll
Setup is fairly straightforward here which is nice. Each player takes one of the marked five starting crew cards and the matching cubes in the corresponding colour. Place one cube on the point tracker board (dual-layered no less) and that’s it for you as a player. The communal setup is equally swift – mix all the 1, 2, 5 prestige/hazard tokens face down on the table and deal a starting market of crew cards which varies a little by player count. Place the 12 custom dice within reach and you’re all set.
In the beginning…
The aim of the game is to… well get the most points, which seems obvious, but the end of the game is actually triggered when someone’s recruited either one crew card of each of the five colours, or three cards of the same colour. I mention this now because there’s a not unlikely chance that you could be the player to end the game and not necessarily end up with the most points. Equally if you’re pretty confident in your lead, you can try and pull the ladder up behind you as quickly as possible.
They see me rolling
There’s a neat structure to your turn that blends some agency and choice with good old fashioned push-you-luck.
You begin by rolling five of the 12 dice and using the results to help steer you towards one of the crew cards in the display to work on this turn. Each card has between three and four Moonrakers symbols (reactor, thruster, damage, shield) or may contain a new wild symbol that predictably can count for any of the previous four. They also have numbers from 1-4 below each symbol showing how many you’ll need to roll and lock-in to achieve that part of the card.
Let’s take a simple example. The Orange crew card (which will be shuffled into the deck if it’s not chosen during setup) needs 2 damage, 2 shields and 1 reactor to completely fulfil its requirements. Let’s say your first roll yields a statistically unlikely 1 damage, 3 thrusters and 1 purple “extra die” symbol (which makes up the final face on all the dice). You select this card as the one to work on and place one of your cubes above the 2 damage slot on the card as you’ve not yet completed it.
You can now choose the push and reroll the remaining 4 dice (plus adding another to the pool for the purple symbol you rolled) or stop. Choosing to stop is pointless as you’ve not achieved anything, and despite the dodgy first roll, it’s pretty unlikely you won’t get at least 1 damage or wild symbol from rolling five dice. So you push.
This time it’s much better with 1 damage, 1 shield, 1 wild, 1 thruster and another “extra die symbol”. You can only work on one card in the display per turn, so even if these were more beneficial for a different card, you’ve made your lunar bed and now you have to lie in it. Fortunately this roll helps us no end. We can choose to lock in the second damage die (or the wild) to complete the 2 damage requirement by sliding our cube from above the slot to be covering it.
Again we can choose to push or stop. If we push and somehow managed to not roll anything that would help us on either of the remaining two requirements, we’d automatically bust and we’d lose the cube we’d just secured on the damage slot. These only become immoveable once you’ve stopped.
If you choose to stop (as we’ll do here for brevity’s sake) then the cube is now permanently covering that requirement and will score you points equal to the number of symbols you needed to cover it – in this case 2! But you don’t score them just yet…
Hey, that’s my card!
Not yet it isn’t buddy. See for Moonrollers, you only get to keep the card if you’re the player who completes the final requirement on it. This inherently incentivises you to keep pushing because you don’t want to be the player who does 80% of the work just to watch an opponent swan in and add it to their scoring area and have its benefit available to use.
On the other hand, as we’ve seen, pushing too far can mean all the other cubes you placed this turn could be wiped out, potentially costing you points.
So there’s a balance in this that you might have seen in other games. The Beneficial Deeds board in Orleans is a great example of this. You can diligently fill up the requirements on one section, but a combination of turn order and/or a bad pull from the bag can mean someone else sneaks in and takes the glory.
Medieval French digression aside, when someone completes the card, they do get to add it to their play area and that’s the moment at which all the points are scored. This is another interesting moment of potential peril as you could have 9 points waiting for you on that card, but if someone else completes a different one on their turn and ends the game, you’ll never see those points at all.
Can too many cards spoil the… broth?
“Unknowable” is probably my answer. Remember having the card puts you in the driving seat for ending the game, not necessarily winning it. But those benefits can dig you out of a sticky situation when you’ve rolled something atrocious and you frantically search your tableau for a saving grace that allows you to lock in a different type of die to fulfil a requirement.
The only thing to be aware of is you can only have one active ability per colour of card, so if you grab a second orange card you have to choose whether to keep the existing ability, or swap it for the new one you’ve just achieved.
Watch the hazards
This is the final devious twist in the tale. On the cards, some requirements also come with a hazard symbol above them meaning at the moment you complete it (whether or not you later bust), you have to draw two of the facedown random hazard tokens and choose one to keep.
These tokens have differing point and hazard values:
- 1 point, 0 hazards
- 2 points, 1 hazard
- 5 points, 2 hazards
While these might feel like a lovely secret boon at the end of the game, you don’t automatically get to score them. And this is where it gets more nuanced than the rest of the game. If you’re the person with the most hazard symbols showing then you’ve encountered too many difficulties and don’t get to score any points. Again this gives you decisions to make if or when you end up having to draw tokens. Taking the higher point values is obviously most appealing, but flying too close to the sun here could mean you end up with a bunch of points you can’t score. A tie for most disqualifies everyone as well. There’s a slight difference for 2-player games in that you’re only disqualified if you have 3 or more hazard symbols more than your opponent.
After all that’s resolved, you add any of these secret prestige points you’re eligible for to your score and as expected, most points wins!
Final thoughts
I’ll be honest and say I don’t play this as often as I probably should. It’s delightfully simple to get to grips with, easy to get to the table and definitely offers either a familiar Moonrakers experience in a fraction of the time or a perfect introduction to this fantastic part of the IV Studios stable of games.
The art is a fab, modern feeling affair, the components themselves are a delight with wonderful premium-feeling custom dice and player cubes. The basic hazard tokens are a chunky enough cardboard, but the one upgrade you can get for this game are some dull metal tokens which really round off the premium feel of the whole game.
Push-your-luck is one of my favourite mechanisms and this does it incredibly well. Not only are you chancing it with the dice each turn, but the balance of going for points on cards against trying to actually complete the cards is really well done, and the mystery of the hazard tokens and managing the larger points against the hazard symbols themselves is brilliant.
I’d absolutely recommend this to anyone as a general push-your-luck game and definitely a great Moonrakers experience to boot.
