Welcome To The Moon

My total obsession with Welcome To Your Perfect Home by Benoit Turpin is well documented. Indeed, I wrote a feature last year covering all of the expansions (which you can read here!). There are so many – from Easter eggs and summer ice cream trucks to zombie apocalypses and Halloween ghouls, you could build your dream digs almost anywhere.

What makes the expansions special to me is that they require very little added effort to learn. The base multiplayer solitaire gameplay of flipping cards, choosing pairs comprising one number and one scoring bonus action, and then allocating numbers to a row of houses on your sheet doesn’t change. Turns are still simultaneous, numbers still have to be consecutive (although breaks and directional changes occur in some), and actions still enhance the value of your streets. On that basis, you can practically hit the ground running straight out of the shrink. What changes each time is the theme as well as the specific ways in which the bonus actions accumulate points.

And although Welcome to the Moon is actually a standalone game in the series (like Welcome to Las Vegas before it), it adopts the same basic gameplay. After that, however, this final chapter in the Welcome To game-iverse is in a whole other galaxy when it comes to how much game is inside the box!

Rocket Launch

For a start, Welcome to the Moon is technically a campaign led game although each of the 8 chapters can be played independently. Unlike the one-off originals, the game has an unfolding narrative. From launching rockets to building and mining and ultimately colonising the Moon, each one of the game’s 8 different boards tackles a specific phase of development.

And just like the expansions, each one of the (now dry wipe!) 8 individual sheets puts its own twist on the basic game play. It’s effectively 8 Welcome To games in one. Indeed, the first game actually strips away the bonus element and focuses solely on number allocations. Although that sounds quite strange to somebody familiar with Welcome To, it works quite well as a very basic introduction to the series for anybody who has never played any of the previous iterations.

Rocketing Along

From Adventure #2, it’s obvious that Welcome To The Moon is leveling up. I can’t reveal too much, mind you, as the campaign mode enables you to make decisions that impact on subsequent chapters. And if you play in order, you can run through the campaign 1 through 8 multiple times and achieve a different outcome.

As somebody who has played all the Welcome To games, Welcome To The Moon is phenomenal. I always thought the reverse directional ice cream trucks in the Summer Welcome To expansion would be the crunchiest of all the options. But 3^rd Chapter in, and the satellite nomination-based adventure in Welcome To The Moon was already giving my brain the Space shakes!  Actually, scratch that. I think the Rulebook for Welcome To The Moon itself might be the most complicated thing in the Welcome To series.

I’m kidding of course. Well, sort of. Reading through them, the rules do feel unnecessarily convoluted. Granted there are 8 new challenges and admittedly each one has a different way of scoring (some of which are quite complicated – Adventure #6 I am talking to you!). But, as somebody who is familiar with Welcome To, even I got in a bit of a muddle trying to follow them at times.

Notwithstanding that, Welcome To The Moon is brilliant. We are up to Adventure #7, and I have really liked the different variations for scoring on each sheet so far. In fact, I am ashamed to admit that I haven’t played the original Welcome To or any of the base expansions since starting Welcome To The Moon! I will go back to them of course, but following the storyline and building up to the campaign end in Welcome To The Moon is very exciting!

There’s also a beefed-up solo mode and campaign with 8 different levels of AI opponents that draw on the earlier architects’ deck of old and then shoots it into space in terms of challenge worthiness. I play games on my own a lot and I can assure you that Welcome To The Moon also has plenty of solo surprises along the way (although again the solo rules aren’t always the clearest).

Final Thoughts

Welcome To The Moon is an absolute asteroid belter of a game. It’s actually 8 games plus a replayable campaign plus a meteoric solo mode! The component quality overall is very good. The sheets are now dry wipe and the various card packs come in little tuck boxes. The included markers are the only low point. The nibs are too thick to write on many of the spaces without obliterating other important details. As such, I would highly recommend you borrow a marker from another game or stock up on finer nibbed dry wipe pens.

If you have never played Welcome To, there’s no reason not to start with Welcome To The Moon. It has so much game play and the build-up in terms of challenge level is consistent across the adventures. You also get a banging solo mode as well as a campaign on top. The replayability of Welcome To has always impressed me and Welcome To The Moon is no different. That Welcome To The Moon is the final game in the 3 part series makes me incredibly sad, but what a shooting star of a game to end on!

Editors note: This post was originally published on July 7th, 2022. Updated on February 1st, 2023 to improve the information available.