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After a long and bloody war, Blue Moon City lies in ruins and it is the job of the players to rebuild it. The eight races of the city will help you rebuild the from the rubble. When a building is completed the players that contributed the most will be rewarded handsomely with crystals. These crystals can be used to rebuild the obelisk that stands in the centre of Blue Moon City. The player who makes the most offerings to the obelisk is crowned the new steward of Blue Moon City and wins the game.
I See A Bad Moon Rising
The new Blue Moon City reprint from CMON plays 2-4 players and takes between 30-60 minutes to play. A game of blue moon city starts with each of the building tiles laid out on their ruined side. On their turn the players will be able to move around the city, contribute to a building or the central obelisk then discard and drawn new cards. Each of the ruined buildings will require between one and four contributions to it in order to rebuild it. Once a building is completed, all players that have contributed to the reconstruction receive a reward.
The player who contributed the most gets a little extra with a little bonus. Any completed buildings that are adjacent to the one being completed now also kick in an extra bit of reward for each player than contributed.
To contribute, a player needs to discard cards with a total value of at least as much as one of the contribution spots on the building. You can contribute more than once to a building in a single turn. Potentially completing it all by yourself in one go and raking in all the rewards. One thing to consider is that once you have made a contribution you need to place one of your player markers onto the space and these are in limited supply. It is completely possible to get yourself into a position where you can’t contribute to a building, or even worse, the central obelisk because all of your markers are tied up in half built boondoggles all around the city.
The cards in Blue Moon City come in one of 8 colours representing the 8 races of the city. Each of these colours, with the exception of green, come in values of one to three. The different colour cards are themed around different abilities. If you want to, rather than using a card to make an offering to rebuild a tile you can discard it for its special ability. The abilities range from allowing you to treat cards as if they were different colours, useful for making offerings, or to moving your player piece anywhere on the board. Three of the colours allow you to move the dragons of matching colours around Blue Moon City.
Dragons are interesting as if you make an offering to a ruined building with a dragon on your space, you will also receive a golden dragon scale. Once the pool of dragon scales is exhausted the player with the most dragon scales receives a pile of crystals. Everybody else with more than three dragon scales gets a smaller, though still very impressive, stack of crystals.
We Built This City
The crystals are used to rebuild the obelisk in the centre of the city. You can usually only contribute once a turn to rebuild the obelisk. One of the card colours can be discarded to allow you to do it twice but you have to pay more for the second contribution. The number of crystals needed to contribute to the obelisk gets larger as more people make contributions over the course of the game. This raises some interesting decisions as you have to be on the central space in order to make a contribution.
So you may find you have to use your turns moving around the map rather than earning crystals and dragon scales. So do you go back with less crystals more often hoping to get the cheapest spaces but having to spend more time moving about? Or do you save up loads of crystals and then just park yourself in the middle. Then make as many contributions as you can but with the contributions costing you a little more?
The game has other interesting choices too. You can contribute little and often to as many buildings as you can just trying to get lots of little rewards. You can also try and make sure you contribute the most everywhere you go to net that little bit extra for your investment. As the city layout is randomised in each play-through it is also worth looking for opportunities due to adjacency bonuses. You may be able to spot a few ruined building tiles that will really rake it in from being adjacent to other completed building tiles. These little gains can really give you the edge in a game of Blue Moon City.
The new production of Blue Moon City is a bit of a strange one. It’s not quite up there with the standard you typically expect from a CMON game. The inlay is nice and the player pieces and dragons are very nice too but the whole game just looks a little bit drab. The colour pallet of the game is a little too gloomy for my tastes. In a game where I am supposed to be rebuilding a legendary city and bringing it back to its former glory, when I flip that tile over, I’d like to see some glory.
Instead the newly built tile looks like it’s been through a weird Instagram filter that has made everything look a little bit murky and underwater. That may be just me though. The art on the cards is fine. It’s functional and the symbology for the actions is clear and concise but they too look a little drab. I wouldn’t call any of the art bad, just a bit disappointing. Also, worth noting is that two of the card colours are incredibly similar under some lighting conditions which is not ideal.
The gameplay is a lot of fun. It’s a very simple turn structure and the game moves very quickly. I find myself watching my friends while we play to try and work out which buildings they are going for to see if I can piggy back in. The number of crystals each player has is secret. You may need to quickly dive into the middle to try to get some cheap obelisk spaces before your opponents can afford it. But you’re just working from memory. I’m sure some people can remember exactly what rewards everybody got from where. But to me, this kind of fuzzy logic keeps you watching your opponents to try and stay one step ahead of them.
The fact that everybody who contributes to a building gets a reward changes things up too. The reward that everyone gets tends to be a little better than the bonus for coming first. This means you can technically get more for your resources by spreading yourself thinly. But it is very possible that you will run out of marker disks leaving yourself stranded. That is until somebody builds something that has one of your markers on it so you can return it to your player area.
There is actually a mini expansion in the box as well. This adds 4 more buildings which can be mixed in with the regular tiles to make a slightly larger map. These new tiles have new special abilities which keep things fresh.
Not Constantinople
While playing Blue Moon City I was reminded of Istanbul. They both have the whole “having to move around a board made of tiles where you can’t get to everywhere quickly but where you kind of need to be everywhere at the same time” vibe to them. With Blue Moon City you need to be clever about your cards and using your markers to invest in buildings.
With Istanbul your markers end up limiting your movement. There is also the fact that what you spend a lot of the time doing in both games is secondary to how you actually win the game. In Blue Moon City you spend most of your time getting crystals from cards to be able to build the central obelisk. In Istanbul you spend most of your time getting goods to trade for gold to use to get rubies. On the surface they don’t look too alike but there are definitely some similar themes in there.
Could you own both? Sure. I do, and I need to justify that somehow. I think they use very different secondary mechanics to prop up the core experience. Blue Moon City is all about the card play and hand management whereas Istanbul uses it’s mon kala style movement mechanic. I am pretty confident that if you like one of these games, you’ll probably like the other one too. Whenever I’ve gotten both games out on a game night there has inevitably been some comparison of the two and which one was better. People don't always agree on which one they prefer over the other. But I’ve never had anybody straight up say they enjoyed one game and hated the other.
