Players 2
First time to play 45 minutes
Subsequent games 20 – 30 minutes
For some, I can probably say Uwe Rosenberg and that will be enough to know whether this is a game they will like, tolerate, or loath (sounds like the name for a new series of articles…). For others, I will explain further.
This is a tile laying game (similar to Patchwork…again not helpful if you haven’t played it or heard of Uwe Rosenberg) with very simple rules, making it remarkably easy to pick up and play. The game is essentially abstract; there is something about the moon in the manual, and the tile selection piece is a moon, but other than that there is no particular theme, nor does it link to the game. Personally, the theme does not matter to me as long as the game is fun.
Initially, tiles are placed around a circle in 11 out of 12 slots, the moon ‘meeple’ (Moople?) is placed in the empty slot. Tile selection is any of the 3 tiles in front of the moon meeple (again, for those familiar, a similar mechanism to Patchwork), the meeple then replaces the selected tile. The number on the tile is the number of spaces that your counter moves around the inner ring. Turn order is determined by position on the inner ring, so whoever’s counter is furthest back takes the next turn. This means that taking tiles with low numbers when you are behind can mean that you have multiple turns.
But, I hear you ask (or not), what do I do with the tiles once I have them? Therein lies the core of the game. With each tile you take, you must lay them in a grid, but not just any grid. The tiles have circles with coloured dots, and the circles represent the goals of the tile. The dots correspond to the colour of tiles you must try to place orthogonally (up and down or left and right) adjacent to the tile, in the quantities indicated. Once this is done, the dots can be covered with a counter, and the first person to use all 20 of their counters wins the game.
The only additional rule is that tiles of the same colour can be chained together (orthogonally) and all tiles in the chain count towards the goal on the tile.
Tiles can have anywhere between zero and four goals, goals can require up to four tiles and these can vary in colour (both between goals and within the same goal). This makes for a very puzzly feeling game, but not one that leaves you thinking for long periods of time – my partner often suffers from analysis paralysis (AP), but the decisions are limited enough that this was not a problem with Nova Luna.
This game can be accused of being a game where you are both playing solo, this is borne out by the solo mode included in the game. This is a fair analysis as interaction is relatively low, with the tactics limited to trying to maximise the number of turns you get vs. your opponent and potentially nabbing some of the tiles they want from those on offer.
The single player game is the same as the multi-player version, with a slight variation in that the goal is to get the lowest score possible. It is scored after the first set of 11 tiles is used up and again once the second set of 11 tiles is used. The numbers on each card are added together and 10 points are added for each disc/counter that wasn’t used (as there is no disc on the central board, there are 21 discs to place in the solo variant as opposed to the normal 20). Any score below 100 is good, according to the rulebook, however my personal best is 104 after several attempts!
In summary, this is a fun puzzly game that is good if you don’t want masses of interaction, but do want something that requires a bit of thought. It was good enough to warrant a replay straight after the first game, and was short enough that this was easily achieved in an evening (after putting kids to bed). The solo mode is also fun if you want a short puzzle, but this is definitely not a game that has immense depth. As to the long term replayability, I’m not so sure. It feels like a game I may get out every now and again when I feel like something different, but replaying week after week may well get a bit repetitive as there is not a lot of variation within the game; time will tell.