Lunar Skyline Review

I don't think Lunar Skyline is the best trick-taker from recent years. It isn’t even my favorite. Hint: go check out Arcs and Cat in the Box if you haven't already. But I put either of those in front of my non-gaming family, and I wouldn't  blame them if their response was “Siri, how do I make ricin?” So what does Lunar Skyline have that those games don't? Simply, it brings a level of casual approachability without dropping an ounce of real decision space that feels almost obscene. How it accomplishes this (or rather, how I pitch it) changes depending on the audience: for fellow extremophiles, it's inspired mad genius, but for people who have trouble playing Modern Art, it's Spades with a couple dials tweaked.

Normally, I'm averse to doing a full teach in my reviews, but I'm gonna break my own rules just to prove a point. After hands and scoring cards are dealt, everyone simultaneously plays a card from their hand as a bid. We'll circle back on bids, but as soon as bidding is done, we go to usual trick-taking, with the twist that every card except high/low aces have two suits. It sounds like a lot, but every suit pair is assigned a color, so if someone leads blue plants/hearts, I know I can follow with purple plants/water. Fun with the color wheel! As usual, the highest followed suit wins the trick and gets to pick the card from the trick that they put into their win pile. Once someone hits their bid, they get to grab one of the scoring cards, which becomes solely theirs. If you can't follow, instead of playing into the trick, you toss a card sideways into your win pile, a “smuggle” that counts towards their won tricks and keys off certain scoring cards. Once the hand's over, players have to lose points and discard down to their bid if they won over their bid, then score their card if they met their bid, and nab a point for every suit in their win pile that matches their bid. Whoever gets the highest score after three hands wins.

I'm not even allowed to teach games at my club, and I still taught y'all Lunar Skyline in a paragraph. If that's not a feat of design, I don't know what is. The whole thing gives “what if one of Knizia's better designs was a trick-taker?” and true to that vibe, there's a sweet spot between all the different paths that's much more about reading the table than gaining systems mastery through memorizing what cards have been played or optimal bid ranges for various player counts. All that would've been enough for me to fall in love with Skyline; I always appreciated Bernie's publishing philosophy of getting more people into the hobby, and here he's struck gold with a game that doesn't compromise anything in order to do so. But then I hit the included mini-expansion that introduces a bid color set collection mechanic, and I had to laugh. Truth is, trying to make your bid work with the hand you've been dealt, player count, and the scoring card deal makes this game enough of a chaos gremlin, the extra layer of “I shouldn't bid red, I've already got the red bid card” feels a bit much. I mean, it does its job of spicing up the lower player count games if you prefer the organized mess of larger group plays or throwing a wrench in if this is a group's only trick-taker and they've played it to death, but I probably won't include it again. It's got the same vibe as most of these modules or mini-expansions and the like that come with the game; I'm happy that they exist for whoever's gonna use them, whoever that is.