Moonrakers: Platinum Edition

In the distant future, shaky alliances form in pursuit of galactic riches. Negotiate, capture bounties, and explore the stars in this slick science-fiction deckbuilder. In Moonrakers, you will compete and cooperate with fellow spacefarers to explore the galaxy, complete contracts and emerge as leader of the eponymous mercenary band known as the Moonrakers.

Like Dominion, Ascension and the like, Moonrakers is a deckbuilder. This means the core gameplay loop orbits, like myriad moons, around your personal deck, which in this case represents your ship and its core systems. You will buy cards to add to this deck, increasing its power and effectiveness with a variety of strategies as the game goes on, always shuffling and redrawing once you’ve depleted it. The game continues until one player secures enough Prestige, representing recognition from fellow space-pirates and corporations alike as the leader of this ruthless fleet.

‘Far, Far Away…’ – Story

The game’s story is ambiguous. I thought this was intentional mystique until a friend of mine received the Titan Edition Kickstarter, which comes with a poorly-written, blandly-illustrated Moonrakers: Origins comic. This pamphlet explains no more than the base instructions do, just presenting it in a visual rather than textual form. To cut to the chase: it’s unnecessary. If you’ve ever played a sci-fi video game like FTL: Faster Than Light (or indeed, any ship-based sci-fi tabletop game) you’ll immediately grasp the idea that you’re piloting a ship, doing missions, and you can acquire crew and upgrades.

In fact, the FTL comparison is apt, as Moonrakers’ gameplay is essentially just an analogue version. Hell, if you’ve ever consumed any sci-fi from Star Wars to Wall-E you’ll perfectly understand, without the need for stuffy accompanying fiction which goes completely against the game’s uncluttered visual language, that ships fly in space, have crew members, and are fitted with things like weapons, shields and thrusters. And in the base game, this works to Moonrakers’ advantage, as the minimalistic mauve spacescapes speak to a sense of wonder and exploration of the unknown, the wire-frame diagrams of the player boards with their empty system slots encouraging you to plug in upgrade modules like the chunky head of a scart lead into the back of an old box TV.

There’s also enough hints to flesh out the story organically; ship parts bear their manufacturer’s stamp, like the glowing yellow thrusters of Ventus, or Komek’s pulsing blue reactors. This spills into analysing the game’s appearance, but the five colours become their own unique visual language, with cards that offer benefits to multiple strategies being subtly bi-coloured. This even extends to crewmates: a pilot who benefits your thruster bays but is more effective if you’ve played a shield – which you could even stretch to hinting at them being a cautious flyer, story-wise – is primarily yellow (associated with thrusters) but has a cybernetic eye which glows green (the colour of shields). It clicks into place so quickly that I’ve only consciously articulated it as I’ve been typing.

‘Across the Stars’ – Core Gameplay

I tend to baulk at games with any mention of alliances or bartering, honesty, or negotiation, and avoid hidden traitor games like the plague. Thankfully Moonrakers avoids the latter camp, but even then I much preferred taking on my contracts solo and failing, rather than making an alliance which seemed like it was even more likely to screw me over than my own inability to pilot my deck on a given mission. I just don’t find it fun outright lying to opponents; it feels like one small step away from plain cheating.

Moonrakers sees players taking on contracts with certain requirements thematically linked to their mission criteria. For instance, fighting off pirates in an asteroid field will require a certain amount of weapon strength and thrusters in your deck. You’ll also roll a certain number of hazard dice based on mission risk, with the difficulty rising as the game goes on until you’re skirting exploding stars and taking down motherships solo, Independence Day-style. Don’t let the theming fool you, though. The object here is to play a certain number of the matching, colour-coded cards on your turn, thereby completing the mission. So… It’s not the most action-packed, but it does feel satisfying to pull off by the skin of your teeth, and the more imaginative players will feel like they made the jump to hyperspace the split-second before a proton torpedo detonated in their wake.

You’ll cycle through this deck most effectively by flying a tight course between actions (represented by Reactors, which allow you to actually play cards) and card draw, represented by thrusters, adding more to your hand on your turn. This system will be familiar to Dominion veterans, and the power of these two facets cannot be overstated; naturally, if you’re drawing nothing but more actions and more draw power, you could just cycle your deck over and over again but achieve nothing (unless you purely take missions which require thruster and reactor cards to be played). However, you need only slip a few cards in between these masses of thrusters and reactors to almost guarantee you draw them, because you’ll spend the rest of the time mechanically racking up draws and actions. It’s just that instead of turns being punchy and meaningful, they drag on for sometimes minutes at a time.

This system therefore encourages specialisation, discouraging multiple routes to victory with one deck… and I don’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I know from experience how disheartening it can be to try a different tactic and watch it blow up in your face in real time. I picked up a weapons card with a special ability of discarding one damage card to gain an action, but this Gatling Laser ended up also adding a damage card to my deck, which slowed my engine down and on one catastrophic turn ultimately left with me a handful of stuff I couldn’t use, as I wasn’t specialising in damage so hadn’t taken a contract which required it. On the other hand, it can be super fun to actively make your ship the ‘tank’ of the group – kitted out with three shield arrays that make it nigh-invulnerable to mission hazards – or, as my opponent did, create a giant flying gun, slow as anything but devastating in combat.

But on the subject of combat, that’s where Moonrakers misses a trick for me: there isn’t any. Damage cards in general seem to be a sort of black sheep of the game’s standard action cards: they’re the only ones which don’t grant an additional benefit as well as fulfil a requirement for a contract, meaning their only real purpose is to add ‘miss’ cards to your deck, clogging up your hand. While thematically representing weapons misfiring, overheating or simply missing their targets, this trade-off doesn’t feel worth it, as player ships have no ‘health’ bars of any kind. If you take hazard damage on a mission, your prestige drops, that’s it. Damage can’t be used to, say, fire on your tenuous allies during missions and lower their prestige even if they’ve already played shield cards, or score additional enemy kills on bounty missions.

Something like that could have added a fun risk-reward to alliances which just isn’t present unless you’re playing with really ruthless opponents (I wasn’t), so weapons cards feel a bit lacklustre despite their inherent universal appeal as fun galactic toys to play with; just watch all the eyes around the table light up when ‘The Obliterator’ shows up in the armoury.

‘Wonders of the Cosmos’ – Components

I’ve seen the artwork referred to as amateurish, and I can see why. Subjectively, though, it really appeals to me. The fact a number of cards have identical base artwork with various accoutrements added on top is somewhat alleviated when you realise these are members of different societies. All Komek crew members, for instance, look like potato-headed Sontarans from Doctor Who, because they’re members of the same intergalactic race.

Regardless, the bright but non-primary colours are a great non-traditional representation of the depths of space, and the cards are simple and elegant without being bland. The game’s cohesive visual language puts it (at least visually) leagues above past deckbuilders like Dominion, with its horrifically mismatched art styles and ugly ‘retro’ graphics. NB – I really enjoy Dominion, but you’ll never convince me it’s a good-looking game, and that’s clear as soon as you read the needlessly inconsistent letter sizes in the title on the box. Moonrakers, on the other hand, has a slick, almost minimalist style which is evident straight away from its deep purple cover slashed with single-colour thruster bursts.

Punching down on old classics aside, I really like Moonrakers‘ artwork, plain and simple. It’s legible, coherent, and colourful without being gaudy or overly neat; static fizzles at the borders of most cards, and some are stamped with black REDACTED bars, giving it a retro-futurist aesthetic. Analogue file extensions like .zip and .txt litter the sections of the effortlessly simple rulebook and subtly reveal a lot more about the game’s story if you read between the pixels.

‘Distant Worlds’ – Additional Thoughts

Maybe we just got lucky with our card draw, but you’re supposed to play with a bot in solo and two-player games. The fact we only learned this when flipping to the glossary halfway through a game to clarify a rule – accidentally discovering the additional section on the specific two-player setup – tells you precisely how necessary it is. I suppose the bot is to alleviate the issue of players feeling forced to cooperate with the one person they’re playing against, but the upshot of playing without the bot was that we just played more like reckless mercenaries than we otherwise would have, which actually made our gameplay even more thematic. We took on what we lightheartedly christened “Screw it, we ball” contracts, where we were highly unlikely to succeed on our own but felt like that’s what our characters would do. This resulted in more organic, hilarious gameplay moments like my Moonraker literally flying too close to a sun on a delivery route named the Icarus Run. I feel like the addition of a cold, clunky bot would have robbed us of this fun and shaken the streamlining of the game, like fitting a boxy satellite dish to a sleek starfighter.

It’s really odd to me that the game and every other review of it that I’ve seen all lead with this ‘treacherous negotiation and fragile alliances in spaaaace’ gimmick. Maybe we’re too narratively-inclined, but we found those semi-cooperative, mostly-competitive mechanics to be a tiny part of the overall experience, and had a lot more fun just piloting our chunky engines across this deceptively rich universe we’d built up in our heads, like children rolling dump trucks around a sandbox. If we needed to band together, it was in the interest of completing a hyperspace jump into the centre of a black hole, not to say “Yeah I can do that mission with you… can you roll ALL the hazard dice this time, please?” The balance of the binary system here seems to lie somewhere between a) “Of course a single credit is enough compensation for helping you intercept that comet. You go right ahead, buddy, I’ve got your back!” and b) (while looking at a hand containing absolutely zero shields): “Right, you fly past that supernova. I’ll DEFINITELY shield you on the way. Go ahead.”

‘To Boldly Go’ – Final Thoughts

What I love most about Moonrakers is how much of a puzzle it is. Even if there’s a few cracks beneath the highly-polished surface, it’s hard to see them under all that lustre. As all players start on exactly the same terms except for their secret objectives, your strategy is gently influenced by a number of interlocking factors. First, say my secret objective is to acquire three Komek (blue) systems for my ship; looks like I’m going to be looking out for ship parts which boost my reactors. Then, the contracts, shouldering much of the game’s narrative weight: do you want to escort a royal frigate, complete a bounty hit on a warlord, or deliver supplies to a downed medical shuttle? Next, the crew cards, bolstering your deck with unique abilities; I must hire that weapons expert before my opponent does. And that’s not even mentioning anything your opponents might be doing. If they’re running the same strategy as you, will you try to outpace them, or pivot and switch up your tactics to make yourself a more attractive ally, and (more importantly) a worthy adversary? The decisions to be made here really scratch my brain in a big way, and none of the different systems crash into each other like so many asteroids against a ship’s hull.

Unlike some other deckbuilders, I really feel like Moonrakers‘ theming capitalises on the idea that you’re running a little self-contained engine. Moonrakers is just so clean and elegant that you really feel like you’re at the controls of a clunky vessel with a ragtag crew. Cycling through your unique deck really feels like you’re captaining a ship and managing its various onboard systems, where I feel outings like Dominion struggle to mesh narratively overseeing a mediaeval fief with the gameplay of… drawing and discarding shuffled cardboard.