Ravensburger recently released the cooperative board game Lunar outpost. The game was made in collaboration with NASA Astronaut Dan Tani and has players work together to build an outpost on the moon. If it sounds fun, you can grab a copy from Amazon now for $ 34.99. Ravensburger was kind enough to send me a copy of the game for review, but what you’ll find below are my thoughts. Also, before I get into it, I have to deny that this game supports Amazon Alexa, but I haven’t tried that feature because I don’t have any Alexa devices.
Lunar outpost it’s a fairly simple game at its core. The game is divided into rounds and therefore each player will perform a number of actions in each round. The game’s default setting gives you 12 rounds, but you can adjust up to 15 rounds to make the game easier or even shorten the number to make it more of a challenge for yourself. Each round begins with the players drawing an Event card that can bring good luck or sometimes bad luck, creating the mining area for the round where you get the materials for the modules you need to build and giving the players Crew cards that give you more options for the round. your ride. Then, in order, players take one turn at a time, depleting Life Support cubes each turn. The round begins with one life support per player, but different cards can alter that over the course of turns. Keep doing this until you win or you can’t draw any more Event cards.
Sounds simple, right? This is because it is. But that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes simple games give you a lot of fun. Lunar outpost it was a very relaxing game for me and my group. I never worried we wouldn’t make it, but as I said, you can always adjust the difficulty if you feel it is necessary. The different pieces look very nice and the fact that you have 4 different types of outposts to aim for (choose before starting) helps add some variety.
Unfortunately, there are some things I wasn’t a fan of. The rules aren’t always very clear. For example, it says that to build Middle Ring modules, you must first complete the Inner Ring. However, it has a game mode where you try to build all three rings including the outer ring, but it doesn’t say whether or not you need to complete the center ring to start building the outer ring. There are also some cards that I would like to have a little more clarification on them. An example is a card that states, “When you take a build action, add life support to the moon dome.” Missing comma aside, I would like it to be clearer if it was only for the player who used the card or if it was for the team. I know some of these things seem like “no duh” moments, but they can go a long way in resolving debates and putting some minds at ease.
One small complaint I have is that the box is huge compared to actual game pieces. I appreciate being able to adapt everything, but it feels a bit empty. If any expansions are released, it’s nice to know it would probably fit into the base box.
Another complaint I have is that you are limited to three Crew cards in your hand, but each round starts with one card and there are very few ways to get rid of the cards other than playing them. This means your hand fills up very quickly. Something I didn’t mention is that at the start of the game, everyone gets a role that tells you how many points you have in each of the three areas (Biology, Engineering, Research). This in turn affects the effectiveness with the different Crew cards. Overall, I like this system, but sometimes you get stuck with cards where you only have one point and aren’t very good for your situation. I think it would be great if you could clear your hand at the end of a round or something.
My last complaint is that the game seems too easy. This will vary from person to person and from group to group, so take it with a grain of salt. Yes, you can adjust the difficulty, but it’s so easy to get extra life support, which means extra turns in a round. Now, you are limited because you have a limited number of Life Support cubes, but there have been a few times when we have maxed out or been very close to maxing out on turns and we basically had nothing left to do, but the cards we played kept giving us Life Support. Seems like 75% of Event cards give you extra Life Support (I don’t have an exact number, that’s a guess).
At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a very simple co-op game that doesn’t make you feel like you can’t win, Lunar outpost it’s big. It is a fun and very easy game with well made pieces. The theme is also really interesting. There were just a few aspects that I thought could have been tweaked a little better.
by Tommy Williams
Source: Geek Tyrant
