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This most recent Friday was a pretty sweet day. First and foremost, it was my daughter’s second birthday. She is basically the coolest thing ever, and for the first time she came to visit me at my job. I am a middle school math teacher, and Friday happened to be “Alumni Day” when last year’s 8th graders come back to visit. It was really cool to see her interact with current and former students, and she loved all the attention she got, especially the “Happy Birthday!”s.
When we got home, The Wife told me to invite some friends over so I would be out of her hair while she cleaned and prepared for E’s birthday party (which was Saturday). Ok, The Wife
. What did I ever do to deserve you?!
So N and Luke the Orange came over. We played the manliest, burliest, most masculine game imaginable – Luna: In the Temple of the Moon Priestess.
Ok, so maybe it’s not manly, but it’s AWESOME. In full disclosure I played Luna solo last week after The Wife and I’s debacle of Seeland. I decided not to first-play review it because most people probably aren’t going to buy Luna (if they can find it…) to play it solo. I will try to be as accurate as possible with my ratings given this review is based technically on my second play.
I explained the rules and we decided it would be constructive to play two practice rounds, reset, and then start the real game.
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I will now review Luna according to the following criteria. Keep in mind this is a review of the game after only one play.
Accessibility (1): How easy was the game to teach and learn? Is it complex and/or fiddly? Are the rules easy to understand and follow? How long did it take to go over the rules?
Fun (1): Is it fun? Included in this might be a theme-to-mechanics metric, or a player interaction metric.
Length of first play (1): Some games say 60-90 minutes, but the first play might take you 3 hours. Not included is length of rules explanation.
Desire to play again (1): Typically I would rather play a new game than play a game I’ve already played (with some exceptions). I know – I am crazy. This will be a good measure of how much I like the game.
Review:
Accessibility:
There is a lot going on with Luna. If I hadn’t played it solo first, I think we would have struggled a bit more, but I would also submit that doing a mock game before teaching a game is a pretty common occurrence (and would probably have done nothing to help with Stronghold!). I struggled through my solo play, but only because I wasn’t familiar enough with the game to really grasp what to do to counter the dummy player (or to really understand what the dummy was doing).
For anyone looking to teach Luna, I really think you should consider teaching the game over the course of two or three practice rounds and then resetting the game and starting anew.
For our game, N and Luke the Orange were asking really good questions about the interplay of the different actions. There was some confusion about the number on the temple tiles acting like “priority points” as opposed to Influence (victory) points, but a quick example in the practice rounds demonstrated it clearly. Luke the Orange wasn’t confident about shrines and thought it reduced the cost of any action from that island by one novice (so he thought you could recruit with one from an island with a shrine for example), but I pointed out that shrines reduced the cost of actions by one novice only for actions specific to that island. That seemed to be a good way to explain it.
Overall it was probably about 20 minutes to explain and then another 25 to play the practice rounds (with stopping for rules clarifications). 45 minutes seems like a long time for explanation, but the practice rounds were engaging, and definitely didn’t feel long or boring.
Score: .7
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Fun:
There was a moment during the second round of the real game when Luke the Orange turned his third candle in a row. He had yet to take more than 3 meaningful actions in the game, and N and I were flabbergasted he was playing so terribly. I was not-so-gently ribbing Luke the Orange about breaking the game, to which he replied something about playing defensively and keeping us from doing anything. I was getting frustrated because Luna was supposed to be awesome (I paid over 60 bucks for it!), and Luke the Orange was ruining it. He was playing with a shrine on Boat Island, and he felt he had everything in place to snatch the majority on whichever island Luna was on. N and I kept trying to explain to him that he needed to be in the temple, but Luke the Orange wasn’t hearing it. N and I couldn’t really get in the temple because the candles were being turned so quickly. N was taking it much better than I, but he also wasn’t the one watching a $60 game turn to crap.
In round 3 with hopes of breaking Luke the Orange’s time-drain strategy I decided to alter my maximum-actions-per-round strategy to making sure I got to take the 3 or 4 most important actions I could before Luke the Orange turned all the candles. This mainly consisted of trying to snag temple tiles and get them in the temple adjacent to as many opponent novices as possible. N was busy setting up a book stealing racket, earning decent points from being in the temple. As a first time player he wasn’t keeping track of his novices though, and he eventually found himself with two novices on the Temple Landing, 4 in the temple, one on Tide Island, and one on Book Island. And no actions to take.
Luke eventually realized how ridiculous his strategy was as he watched N and I both snagged 10+ points from temple tiles/novices-in-the-temple scoring. He stopped turning candles and started playing the game, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was really worried Luke the Orange found a way to “break” the game by making it really not that fun. I was particularly frustrated because Luke the Orange is such a good game player. He’s a bit prone to AP, but usually he does very well with games. In this case, I think he was really over-thinking everything, and he later admitted as much.
Round 4, we all turned the corner and began to really sink our teeth in the game. By the end we were simultaneously smack-talking each other and then congratulating each other as we all pulled off impressive combos. At the end of the game I came out on top – 69, 50, 50. N’s engine-stalling really hurt him in the final rounds as he just couldn’t compete for Luna points, while Luke the Orange’s early-game shenanigans left him behind the 8-ball.
We all agreed that Luna was awesome, we had to play again, and Luke the Orange admitted his strategy sucked. The cool thing though, was that Luna offered up such an extreme strategy during the first play (even if it failed). I’m glad it didn’t work, because as long as everyone is playing optimally, Luna is a really fun game. Really fun. Check the score if you don’t believe me.
Score: 1
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Length of first play:
Luna ran a bit longer than I think the three of us would have liked, but much of that was because we played a third of a game before we actually played the game. If I can factor that out, I’d say Luna earns a .8 for Length of first play, but I can’t double-dip, as I’ve already scored Luna higher on ACCESSIBILITY because of the practice rounds.
Score: .6
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Desire to play again:
I’ve already played it solo three more times. Luke the Orange and I have talked about playing it again, discussing strategy and optimal placement of shrines. I have looked at trying it on Yucata.de. Right now there isn’t a game in my collection, new or otherwise, that I would choose to play over Luna. I’m sure some of this “puppy love” will wear off eventually, but right now I LOVE LUNA.
Score: 1
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OVERALL: 3.3/4
Wow. A 3.3! I think that most games I first-play review will hover between 1.5 and 2.5 based solely on the fact that many games don’t scream awesome on their first play. But for us, we immediately saw the spark of an amazing game in our first play. The next day during E’s birthday party, N, Luke the Orange, and I talked about Luna for a good 30 minutes. I’m sure Luna won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but there is a beast of a game there.
Up Next: I’m really hoping to get Bootleggers to the table. I also just got a preorder shipment in including Louis XIV, Ora & Labora, and Walnut Grove. On Tuesday another preorder including Troyes, Kingdom of Solomon, and Dakota should be arriving.
Man I’m so addicted to games…
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