Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Autumn Games - Blue Moon


Our eleventh game was a new acquisition, Blue Moon by Reiner Knizia, the third Knizia game we've played, after Lost Cities and Ingenious.  For a change, we moved to the pub table in our gameroom.


Blue Moon is a card game where players fight a series of battles, each turn playing one character card plus an optional booster card or support card to reach a certain combat value in either fire or earth. The other player must then play his own character, plus booster or support, and match or beat that combat value. Of course, many of the cards have special powers which allow for a wide variety of effects like removing enemy cards from the table, not having to meet the combat value, restricting the other player's actions, or drawing additional cards into your hand. Finding good combinations of cards is the strategic heart of the game. The players play back and forth this way until one player can't or won't play any more cards and retreats.

The winner of the fight attracts from 1-3 dragons to their side of the table. Once one player's deck is completely run out, the player with dragons on their side of the table wins the battle and 1-4 crystals. The first player to five crystals wins the game.

(The game is so deep that Carol and I actually played a practice game so we'd both know how to play before we played the official game.)


The great thing about Blue Moon is the decks of cards. The game comes with two unique, 31 card decks, each representing one of the races of the world of Blue Moon. Each deck has strengths and weaknesses and plays out differently, but they're incredibly balanced. While the base game has only two decks, the Hoax and the Vulca, Fantasy Flight issued nine others. All are out of print and hard to find, but we liked the game so much I managed to locate two more and so we now have four decks to play.


During our first battle, I managed to overwhelm Carol completely, drawing all three dragons to my side of the board and then attracting one more, ending the battle immediately and scoring four crystals, just one away from victory.  We switched decks and Carol fought back, winning the second battle but only attracting one dragon.  Switching decks again, she won another two crystals in that battle, making the score 4 to 3.

During the final round, Carol managed to dominate, not only taking the two dragons she needed to win, but taking all three and attracting a fourth for the full four crystals. I had won the first four crystals of the game but never scored again.

Final scores:

     Carol     7
     Ipecac   4


6 comments:

CJ said...

Don't forget to update the scoreboard.

Eric Haas said...

What’s with this “practice game”? You have a fit if anyone tries to have a practice game at Babycon.

Ipecac said...

You mean as far as putting it on the sacred TOTE BOARD? The TOTE BOARD takes no practice games. Not my rule, it's the TOTE BOARD'S.

Eric Haas said...

No, we never tried or wanted to put a practice game on the sacred TOTE BOARD. The point was just the opposite. We wanted to have a practice game to make sure everyone was clear on the rules, so that when we played a game for the sacred TOTE BOARD, no one was at an unfair disadvantage because they didn’t understand the rules. But, every time we tried that, you said, no, everything counts, everything goes on the sacred TOTE BOARD.

Ipecac said...

Hey, sacred is sacred. :-)

We started playing Blue Moon and so thoroughly bollixed it up the first time (based on my poor reading of the rules) we decided to do the practice game. Plus, I think I'm a bit better than Carol at picking up new games the first time through so I wanted to take away my advantage. Obviously, it worked.

Ipecac said...

Carol and I played Blue Moon again last night and the scoring went pretty much exactly the same. I scored four points in the first round. She fought back to 3 points and then scored 4 points in the final round, winning 7 to 4. Sheesh.