Messy Review:Lunar System
Rating:πββ¬πββ¬πββ¬πββ¬
Lunar System is an evidence board making game created for the Below A Bad Moon Jam by Kaden Ramstack. While Kaden famously doesnβt know how to advertise this game heβs doing something right because I was immediately hooked when I saw the βIs The Moon Haunted?β page Iβve included above, and I knew I needed to check it out as soon as it was released.
Lunar System is a collaborative game about discovering why a former lunar colony abandoned the surface settlement and why their secret underground settlement was also abandoned. Players take on the role of a crew investigating this and take turns asking questions and providing answers in increasing detail to flesh out a picture of what is there now and what it tells us about the fate of the moon. The game is tightly structured and also full of good advice about how to think about questions and answers and form coherent themes in the process. Ultimately, players will build a conspiracy theorist style board with strings connecting different pieces of evidence until they agree theyβve solved the mystery.
The game is based on Iβm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? and Microscope, neither of which Iβm familiar with, so the whole structure is new to me, but I really like it. Iβm a sucker for tight structure and procedure, and as an archaeologist professionally this idea of pulling together physical evidence in an abandoned settlement to understand how they lived is right in my wheelhouse. I havenβt played yet, but I really hope to.
I should also note that the layout and design are phenomenal. They not only look good, but are also structured in a really good way to guide you along the page and take in the content as it comes to understand the game.
While I do love what Iβve seen, I gave this 4/5 mainly because of a couple things that jumped out to me as possibly missing, although I admittedly donβt know that Iβd actually feel the lack of them in play. The first is that the game explicitly plays down the roleplay aspect. While itβs allowed in between turns to spend time discussing how evidence was found, this setting is so evocative I canβt imagine not spending time exploring it through roleplay. I imagine some kind of random-table based play to flesh out locations and provide inspiration for the questions and answers in the prescribed game loop.
The second is mapping. Thereβs what looks like a pointcrawl map on the cover (although I think this might actually be an evidence board now) that got me thinking about how cool it would be to map the place out and discover secrets through exploring the space, kind of related to the point above.
In both cases this probably relates more to my proclivities as an OSR head wanting to turn this into a collaborative mystery dungeon crawl even though itβs a decidedly different kind of game, and I donβt think either point should throw people off this one.
It is fully worth the money to pick this up.