Musings on… Blue Moon (#29)

Edited By David Fair
February 26, 2006

Jason Little:

I’m fiercely ambivalent about Blue Moon… I’ve got about 15-20 total plays with all but the Aqua and Pillar decks, and I’m just left… unfulfilled? I was deep into MtG, and just about every other CCG that was printed within MtG’s first 6-8 years, but finally kicked the habit a few years ago. So I’ll admit that I was tantalized by the prospect of a light, “safeâ€? CCG replacement.

It was a fun diversion at first, as we learned the various themes and play styles of the decks. But that wore off very, very quickly. Ultimately Blue Moon doesn’t actually fill the need I had hoped it would. Not that it’s a bad game, it’s just not the game I was hoping it might be.

Another difficulty in evaluating Blue Moon is… what exactly do you evaluate? Just the core box set and the two decks that come with it? The entire series of pre-built decks? With or without Emissaries? Based on deck construction? What exactly is the core of the Blue Moon game, in terms you would relate to an interested new player?

I think the pre-built decks are an interesting way of marketing the game to create the illusion that’s it’s not necessarily collectable, but the inclusion of non-faction cards in each deck diminishes the value of the pre-built concept… Playing the Khind deck purely from the Khind starter isn’t really playing the Khind deck, since you have a lot of non-Khind cards in there and you’re missing some important Khind cards.

I think there are balance issues with the pre-built decks, and that the strategies and play of each deck is pretty structured and gets repetitive quickly. But taking the time to custom build decks doesn’t offer enough of an improvement in gameplay to warrant the investment. By the time someone purchases that many decks and spends that much time tinkering, I think they’d be better off with Magic: the Gathering, Game of Thrones, grabbing some old Netrunner or getting into some other CCG that offers a richer experience.

Richard Young:

I’m more of a strategy gamer (that’s what we war-gamers call each other these days) but I’ve dabbled in a few card games (San Juan, Naval Battles, Nuts!) and in another life I was a big fan of Magic: The Gathering. So, especially after becoming thoroughly disenchanted with the direction Wizards of the Coast were going with the wonderful game M:tG started out as, I haven’t exactly been chasing card games down.
However, I couldn’t help picking up on the positive buzz that followed the release of Blue Moon out of Kosmos Games (available to us here in North America courtesy of Fantasy Flight Games). Perhaps it was simply because Reiner Knizia designed it. But when Chris Farrell raves about a game, something I have grown accustomed to him never doing, I pay attention!

I picked up the base game, happy that whatever the merits of the game I wasn’t going to be out a ton of change, and even picked up a couple of the extra decks that were available as well. The game is for two players and involves fighting a series of duels to woo the favour of three dragons and ends when all three are on one side or the other. Nice idea I thought. No-one dies - this should be ok with parents.

Your duels are fought by character cards with varying values of two kinds of attack, earth or fire (erm, “earth�?), supported by other cards that provide boosts to the individual characters or cards that support all your attacks in the particular duel (think “creature enchantments� versus “global enchantments�).

The nature of a duel is pretty straightforward: one side picks a character, announces the nature of his attack (a fireball or a...mudball?) and waits to see how his opponent will respond. The other side must respond with a character that equals or exceeds the “power� of the attack, in the right form, or the duel immediately ends and the attacker claims a dragon for his side. Character cards can follow other character cards and their powers added to reach the necessary value and the booster and support cards can also be used to increase the power numbers needed. When one side or the other either can’t or won’t commit any more cards to that duel, it ends with a loss and all cards played to that point are set aside and away you go again.

The sorts of tactical decisions required of the players involve things like how many cards, from the 30 you start with, can you afford to expend in a given duel, since a number of duels are going to be necessary to get all three dragons to your side. And of course, depending on the nature of your deck, there are going to be some duels that are going to be fruitless in any event...better to concede them early and hope to move on to where your strengths are.

The basic game has you using a straight deck which is very much like using a monochromatic Magic deck. Optional rules allow you to get into more intricate deck building which can bring in a number of similar considerations as does Magic deck building. A growing number of optional extra decks are being released to allow for a greater variety of approaches but so far this does not follow the pattern of a standard collectable card game. But there appear to be no end to the number of additional decks possible so if you are susceptible to the collector instinct, watch out!

So what about the game? As you may have already noticed, there are a lot of similarities to M:tG. I imagine that someone who has never encountered that game would find this one to be quite engaging. I think this may turn out to be a decent gateway game for kids who (shudder!) may go on to get totally lost in the myriad of CCGs out there which offer much deeper game play (well except for Yu-Gi-Oh of course). Adults will be amused to the extent that they should be willing to help their kids learn this and play it with them for a while. In some ways it reminds me of some card games I played as a kid (Snap! and War!) with a standard deck of playing cards. Here the cards are very artfully done and very thematic of some fantastic world far from here (or Kansas).

So all in all, I seem to have found a fair number of words to kick off a discussion of, at best, a fair game. I don’t care to actually assign it a rating number as opinion on this game will be very subject to considerations as to the age group and context of potential players.

Chris Brooks:

I own Blue Moon and played about 5 times shortly after it was released. While I enjoyed the game, it didn’t give me nearly the satisfaction that Magic: the Gathering does. I’ve managed to play Magic for the past 10 years without any attempt at collection and felt that the $40-$50 I spend per year on pre-constructed decks or tournament packs is well worth it.

To me, this felt too much like yet another CCG (I know it isn’t, but...) and I haven’t felt compelled to play again since those initial sessions.

Morgan Dontanville:

I haven’t played Blue Moon. I don’t really enjoy CCGs and after playing the astoundingly unpleasant Scarab Lords I wasn’t all that excited to try this out.

Richard Young:

Morgan, I know where you are coming from completely. Anything that remotely resembles a CCG sends me running as well. But, there are a number of decent non-collectible card games that aren’t all that bad. I mentioned a couple in my original comments and Colossal Arena is also an excellent one by all reports. Reiner Knizia hasn’t put his name on a dog yet and based on some very good reviews I made the plunge.

While it should be pretty clear that I was somewhat lukewarm to the game after all that, it has some very good ideas. The card interaction is reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering it’s true, but not a direct steal. It is different enough to stand on its own quite securely. Perhaps having been quite captured by M:tG back in the day, I am jaded when it comes to those sorts of card games. I’ll repeat my earlier comment in a more positive way - if you haven’t played M:tG at all or only toyed with it and if you are willing to give non-collectable card games a chance, then this could be one of the ones you should try.

Dave Kohr:

I really like Blue Moon. I think it’s the first successful customizable but not collectible cardgame. “Customizable� means it has rules and a large enough set of cards to build interesting decks. “Not collectible� means the contents of the packs of cards are not randomized, as they are in CCGs. I also like the fact that the gameplay and deckbuilding appear to be relatively rich although the basic game rules are pretty simple--this is also unlike some CCGs that achieve their richness through complex base game rules that grow with each new expansion.

Based on a limited number of games (about 4-5 so far), I think the gameplay is good. Its fast (under 20 min. for a complete game between experienced players), and gameplay tends to vary a fair amount based on the card draws you get. I find the strategy interesting both on a tactical level (how do you play your hand in the current fight), and on a strategic level (how much do you commit to this fight versus save for future fights).
The replay value is helped tremendously by the number of pre-built decks. If you have N different pre-built decks, then without doing any deckbuilding you can form N * (N - 1) / 2 different matchups. For the 8 decks I have, that’s 28 matchups, more than I’ll ever try. The pre-built decks seem fairly balanced against each other, although there is supposedly a substantial curve for learning how to play some of them well.

The theme is a pretty old one (especially for CCGs): varied collections of fantasy creatures are trying to beat each others’ brains out. I find this theme endlessly fascinating (in part because I like fantasy, and in part because I like wargames), so it works for me. The artwork on the cards is excellent and matches the theme quite well. My only quibble about theme is that the “flavor text� on some of the cards sounds a little silly--since the game appeared in German first, I wonder if perhaps something was lost in translation.
And then there’s deckbuilding. This is one part of the game I’d really like to try out, but haven’t. The deckbuilding rules seem to have been crafted to make it easy to build good decks without needing huge piles of cards, and also to tone down powerful cards and combinations to improve balance. One key deckbuilding rule is that you can’t ever have 2 copies of the same card in the same deck. That makes it easy to build any legal deck, if you own a copy of every card--this is very different from many CCGs, where you often want multiples of certain powerful cards. Also, each deck is aligned with a particular faction, and certain powerful cards from other factions have a cost (in “moons�) that limits the number of them you can put in your deck. This makes it harder to stack a deck with extremely powerful cards, which should make more different deckbuilding strategies viable.

Perhaps the most important aspect of deckbuilding is what clever combinations of special card powers you can construct. In this regard, Blue Moon seems to shine, at least on the surface. A deck could focus on being powerful in either fire or earth. It could emphasize support or booster or leader cards. A “stalling� deck could rely on base-game special powers such as immunity, which is described in the base game rules and denoted by an icon. And then there are many special abilities defined in rules text on specific cards. The prebuilt decks of most factions rely on a few of these powers. For example, the Khind are a “gang� whose power in a fight increases as you play more of them into the fight. I don’t know how many of these strategies are actually viable, but there certainly are a lot of them to try out!

From looking at the Geek, it seems there are people out there who’ve tried building decks. Deckbuilding games work best when there is a (nearby) community of players testing their decks against each other. Unfortunately, like most CCGs, this game doesn’t seem to have spawned that kind of community, at least not around where I live. CCGs also thrive on regular releases of new cards, and while new sets have been appearing over the last year, it’s not clear for how much longer they will continue.

I said at the beginning that I thought Blue Moon was the first “successful� non-CGG customizable game. By “successful�, I meant both as a good strategy game and in terms of sales. I explained above why I think it’s a good game. I assume the game is selling well because Kosmos keeps putting out new sets.

Blue Moon isn’t the first attempt to do this sort of thing. Knizia’s earlier Scarab Lords/Minotaur Lords was also intended to be customizable, but as published, the card set was too small for deckbuilding. Also, I don’t think it was as good a game as Blue Moon--I played it several times, and although I enjoyed it, I thought it was a bit too long and too random. GMT published Flagship, which I thought was truly awful as a game (and in every other way for that matter), and it didn’t even have real deckbuilding rules.
Probably the second most successful game along these lines was Mystick Domination, by Anoch. This one was interesting because all the decks were also tarot decks, and the game was designed for 2-5 players. I also liked the theme (all-powerful beings doing battle through their earthly minions), and the artwork, which was entirely old paintings (some famous, many not). I found the gameplay fun, but perhaps a bit too random--I’m not sure there was a lot of strategy to the game. Like Blue Moon, the deckbuilding rules prohibited multiple copies of cards. In an odd twist, decks were also constrained to be valid tarot decks, which greatly limit the range of legal decks. I never looked much into deckbuilding for this game, but because the special powers were generally more limited than in Blue Moon I suspect there were fewer viable strategies. Anoch put out 4 sets for the game, in 2 releases of 2 sets each. Unfortunately it never caught on and Anoch soon folded.

Shannon Appelcline:

I find it sad that even in this discussion Blue Moon has been blasted both for being a CCG and for not being one. The anti-CCG crowd attacks it for having any hint of collectability _even if the game plays well in and of itself_. The pro-CCG crowd meanwhile tears it apart for not being as complex as Magic. So poor Blue Moon gets it both ways, at least in this forum.

I actually think the relative simplicity of Blue Moon is something of a benefit. As I’ve written elsewhere any true CCG system tends to warp upon itself as more and more rulings and clarifications are made, to the point where you have to speak a strange and foreign language to play most CCGs--to understand (for example) how “discard� and “play� are clearly different words, in ways that might not even match the English definitions of these words. I’m not entirely happy with some of the rulings that were made in the official Blue Moon FAQ, because they’re leaning in this direction, but I hope that the system’s core simplicity will keep this tendency from getting too bad.
Onto a different topic: Jason asks, “How do you evaluate it?� I think the answer here is pretty clear: you initially evaluate it as if the original Blue Moon box were all that ever existed. If you paid just $24.95 for that set, and could never get any supplements, how would it stand up?

Personally, I rated it a 4 out of 5 on that basis over at RPGnet [ http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11049.phtml ]. It was no Lost Cities, but it was also better designed than most other 2-player games out there, and it offers more complexity and replayability than several of the other 2-players that I acquired in the last year (Fjords, Architekton).

Then, you can either rate each expansion separately, (how does this do as a $10 supplement?), or you can rate the whole thing as a package (how does this rate as a $104.95 game system, comparable with one display case of a true CCG?). I’m going to have to think about the individual decks, but as a whole I suspect Blue Moon comes across very strong. You’re going to get a much better and more playable set of Blue Moon cards than you’d ever get from a display of a CCG, and your main problem isn’t going to be creating interesting decks, but instead finding opponents.

Musings On… is a roundhouse forum discussion on games and topics related to gaming. if you are interested in participating in future discussions, please email David Fair at dafair followed by the at sign and gmail.com.

© 2006 Rick Thornquist

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Comments:

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My opinion of Blue Moon is no mystery to anyone who has read the BGG forums.  We’ll leave it to say I am a fan. I just wanted to point out an inaccuracy in Jason Little’s intro - he says the inclusion of non-faction cards diminishes the pre-built decks.  This is simply not true.  The decks were all playtested to be balanced-as-published - with those out-of-faction cards in them.  Recent discussion in the BGG forums has started to point to exactly which peoples are hurt and helped by ‘reconsolidating’ the decks based on people. The non-faction cards in no way diminish the pre-built decks - they are integral to them.  Yes, it is part marketing ploy to have the out-of-place cards, but it also follows the theme of the people’s fighting the war with the aid of mercenary assistance from the other people of the planet. -MMM Posted by Matthew Monin on Feb 27, 2006 at 12:27 AM | #

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