Lunar Rush review— Moon gold futures to the moon!

I’m absolutely obsessed with economic games. Turns out, as much as capitalism is a deeply flawed system that humanity will either abandon or be destroyed by, it’s a great foundation for a collection of cardboard with no stakes. Problem is, most of them live in the hellscape of unregulated capitalism, which those of us whose families don’t own more property than a handful of people could ever reasonably utilize know, absolutely blows for those on the bottom, meaning they’re not beginner-friendly experiences. Sure, I intuitively know that in a game of player-driven supply and demand that the table has to keep players from monopolizing a good at all costs, but Mike doesn’t, and it isn’t his fault that he’s old and it’s been forever since he was taught basic economics. Lunar Rush seeks to fix this by providing a smooth onboarding experience for genre neophytes but adding enough modular bite to keep the old hats intrigued.

Lunar Rush dips its toes in a whole lot of pools, mechanically. Players cycle through their bid cards in a secret auction to get first dibs on shipping lanes to send stuff to and from the moon on cardboard tray ships that are a surprising delight to load and push around the board, and then use those resources to build a personal worker placement engine on their player board moon base. Finally, they can sell their moon goods back on earth on a simplified market where each item sold drops the price of that good until the price gets too low and it triggers a reset. The whole process is easily learned and mastered by genre adepts, and the beginner cards with round specific point rewards for specific goals that’ll get noobs on their feet do an amazing job of keeping everyone on an even playing field.

As you might have guessed, without any incentives to bid low the game quickly devolves into playing your highest bid on cooldown, but that’s where the gold modules step in. These are overpowered extensions to your moon base that you build from the public options in reverse bid order. There’s inevitably going to be a few turns where the available gold modules don’t work for everyone, so there’s the moon wonders mini-expansion, drafted by the players in a phase right after gold modules in that same reverse order. They also mix up the game with a nice dollop of points and rewards for different builds that aren’t optimally utilized without them, which is always nice.

By now you’re probably looking back at that score confused as to why I gave a game I have so many nice things to say about a 75. Well, there’s just enough missteps here and there that you can tell that Dead Alive is still coming into its own as a publisher. Those linchpin gold module cards? A smidge too dark and foiled like an old Magic card, making them hard to read from across the table. They also have the hallmark mtg foil warp/bowing issue, making it so they don’t properly function as the worker placement spots most of them are supposed to be. The rulebook is formatted strangely, with a two-page break after the component bit in the front for some flavor and lore and an essay on the science of moon launches in the back where you want the index and whatnot else. You put that stuff in its own book or a separate sheet or something, otherwise you wind up with these issues that make themanuals harder to use than necessary. Speaking of unnecessary impediments to use, the hard sci-fi theme makes it so the building art on your base upgrade cards are generally samey and fail to convey their purpose with a couple exceptions. I know you’re not gonna hit the O’Toole ideal of beauty and function with all your art, but it feels like the choice of theme proves to be a hindrance more often than not when I’m looking at a sci-fi game.