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William Lindsey
United States
Marion
Indiana
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My wife and I just celebrated our second anniversary by traveling to Indianapolis and touring the city. While we were there, we visited the amazing Arsenal Game Room. The man working there was very friendly and helpful. There were a few people playing Magic upstairs, and there was an RPG session going in one of the rooms downstairs. They have a selection of board games that are freely available to try, so we decided to give Luna a go.
The set-up took quite a while, as there were quite a few moving parts. At this point, I wasn't sure if Melissa would take to it at all. She is great with complicated systems (she has a PhD in math), but complexity for the sake of complexity frustrates her. With all the pieces, I thought this one might be too much.
We were in for a pleasant surprise, though. All of the parts worked together quite seamlessly. The actions on the seven islands seemed natural once we read through the rules. Using the people to fill up the temple worked well too. We had to refer to the rules a few times, and we forgot a rule through most of the game, but mostly we just sat down and played. And that is how a game is supposed to work.
In the game itself, Melissa seemed to be ahead for most of the game. She used the book favor to good effect and was able to expel a few of my people from the temple. She also used bribery favors well to jump way ahead on the temple path and expelled two of my people at the same time. Meanwhile, I was building shrines on the islands, and also gaining new people whenever I could.
When we got to the last few rounds, she started to run out of useful things to do, and I was able to use my people advantage to good effect. We forgot throughout the game that we could use people from any island to move the councilors up. There were multiple times that we just left people active. Anyways, in the last round, Melissa spent all of her people moving the councilors up, and I built another shrine and got the last temple token. The Moon Priestess and the Acolyte were both on the same place, and Melissa didn't think I had anybody there (he was hiding behind the priestess), so she didn't leave her person active on that island. This cost her five points at the end (I got the five points for the priestess that she didn't think I'd get).
When we totaled the points, I ended up winning by one. As with all of our games, wins and losses don't really count the first few times we play.
This game is quite interesting. The complexity is really well done, so that it becomes secondary to the flow of play. I feel that there are many paths to victory; Melissa and I followed completely different paths, and we still were only one point away from each other. I hope I'll have the chance to try this one out again.
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