Why I Like Blue Moon

It seems I'm late for everything. My friends have learned not to trust anything I say about when I'll show up. My professors have been remarkably accommodating of my tendency to grin sheepishly and say "At least it's only three days late this time." Slip me some scotch and put on Human Traffic, and you'll get to hear me bitch at considerable length about how I got into the rave scene about seven years too late and four years too old.

So it goes with Blue Moon. By the time I found out about it, it had been out of print since 2007, leading to jacked up prices on what core sets were still available. On the up side, the supplemental decks are going for a song (six bucks a go on Meeplemart), and the game can be played with just these expansions and the rules, so The Hunger can be at least partially satisfied.

Blue Moon was created by Reiner Knizia, who I can't mentally name without adding an apostrophe like Flapjack's Captain K'nuckles. K'nizia is the Frank Zappa of game design, which is to say, ridiculously prolific - in an industry where every gamer wants to be a designer, he has over 500 published games - and massively influential - He's pretty much the face of the German school of game design, and his games reflect that school's obsession with simple rules and complex strategy.

Blue Moon's an excellent example of both. The game is played with 30-card decks representing various crazy fantasy races (mercifully none of the Tolkien assortment pack - I'll take bright red golem/natives and caterpillar people over orks'n'elves any day) trying to win fights and thus seduce the three fickle dragons that rule their world. To do this, you play a character card, declare whether the ensuing fight is to be fought based on the Fire or Earth stats and draw new cards. Your opponent plays another character (or combination of a character and a support or booster card - Boosters only affect a particular character, supports affect all the characters you play that fight) to equal or exceed your value in the chosen element. If they do, you have to play a new character and support cards to equal or exceed them. This back-and-forth continues until one player can't or won't equal the current active total, whereupon they admit defeat, the other side moves one or more dragons to their side (or from the loser's side to neutral), all the cards in play are discarded, and the loser starts a new fight. This continues until one player has all three dragons and would win another, or until one player runs out of cards, in which case the player with any dragons (or, failing that, any cards) wins.

There's some interesting conflict and tough choices to be had just using this simple arrangement. If you have a character with a mediocre Earth and strong Fire, do you play it to continue the current Earth-based fight, or retreat and save it for later? Do you keep the level of the fight relatively low, allowing both you and your opponent to toss out small fry characters and wear each other down, or do you escalate and hope to overcome on sheer shock and awe (particularly worrisome if you don't have the resources to keep the escalated fight going another round)? Another point to add to this hand-wringing: If the winner has played six or more cards, they attract an extra dragon, so it's wise to give up a hopeless conflict before it reaches that level. Of course, what qualifies as a "hopeless conflict" can vary from turn to turn as you draw new cards and have to new options to weigh, particularly as many of the character, booster and support cards have their own rules text to change up the basic game.

Considering this last, it's amazing that the various decks are balanced as well as they are, a state of affairs I'll credit to Knizia's  PhD in Mathematics. What's more, each deck has a significantly different feel, from the basic game's Hoax and Vulca representing a relatively straightforward "Boost myself/Fuck you over" dichotomy to the birdlike Flit's incredibly irritating reusable cards, to the amazonian Mimix and Oompa-Loompa-esque Khind's ability to twin up and form gangs respectively, which look similar on paper but which play completely differently, to the Pillar's giant fuck-off caterpillars that eat cards from the opponent's hand.  It's the kind of balanced equality you'd expect from an extremely well-made fighting game, and like those, it takes a fair bit of practice to really use your favoured ass-kickers to their greatest effect.

But wait, say you, the reading audience - isn't the game extremely out of print? How can you have significant experience with even one deck, much less the encyclopedic knowledge that you claim? Well, one of those wonderful Internet obsessives has taken it upon himself to create an AI simulator for the entire game. While it does kind of get up my pantleg that it always loads with you as the Hoax fighting the Vulca, that's a minor complaint - It looks good, it plays well, and all the interface questions I've had thus far are covered by the accompanying FAQ. Fair warning: the AI is very, very good - Download the rules and rely heavily on the Assist menu option until you get into the rhythm of the game, or you'll get your ass handed to you early and often.