Wouter & Ymke 
Humanity has finally made it. We have permanent settlements on the Moon, rockets are arriving with supplies, colonists are ready for a fresh start, and robots are standing by to do the heavy work. It all sounds very promising, doesn’t it? A clean step towards the stars, with the Moon as our first real base outside Earth.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Food starts running low, robots begin to malfunction, buildings break down, people get hungry, and somehow, even on the Moon, paperwork still exists. That may be the most realistic part of the game. Moon Colony Bloodbath is a tableau-building game by Donald X. Vaccarino, published by Rio Grande Games, for one to five players, where each player runs their own lunar colony while dealing with a shared progress deck that keeps changing during the game.
You build facilities, gather resources, and try to keep enough people alive until the end. Some cards help you, some cards hurt you, and some cards make you look at your colony and think, “Ah. So this is where everything goes wrong.” The game calls itself an engine-building, engine-losing tableau game, and that describes it very well. You’re not just trying to build something useful, you’re trying to keep it standing long enough to matter. In the end, the winner is the player with the most surviving colonists.
👥 1-5 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
🎨 Artwork: Franz Vohwinkel
🏢 Publisher: Rio Grande Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player begins with a small moon base, a few building cards in hand, some starting resources, and a population that you will spend the whole game trying not to lose. You build new facilities in front of you, slowly turning your colony into a little lunar settlement with mines, farms, labs, hotels, storage buildings, and other useful places. Most buildings give you abilities, either by helping you produce more resources, making certain actions stronger, giving you a benefit when they enter play, or sometimes doing something when they are lost. That last part feels strange at first, but it matters, because losing buildings is very much part of the game.
Most of the game runs through the shared progress deck. Each turn, one card is revealed and everyone resolves it at the same time. A lot of the time, this will be a work card, which lets each player choose one of five actions: build, mine, farm, restock, or research. Mining gives you money, farming gives you food, restocking places resource crates on your buildings, building lets you play a new building card from your hand, and research lets you draw more building cards.
What makes the game different is that players keep adding cards to the progress deck. These cards usually go on top, so they often happen very soon after being added. Perks help only the player who added them, while developments affect everyone. Twists can change the rules a bit, and robots are supposed to help, although in this game they seem to have missed that meeting. It gives the game a shared future that everyone is partly responsible for, even when that future is full of air leaks and bad decisions.
Trouble cards are where things become less comfortable. When trouble appears, it adds the next event to the top of the progress deck, so that event will usually happen right away. These events are the disasters and annoyances of Moon life: hunger, paperwork, air leaks, accidents, moonquakes, power failures, and other lovely reasons to never leave Earth. One event, glitch, adds a robot to the deck, and those robots first make everyone lose people before doing their own unpleasant thing.
Population is the real heart of the game. Your people live in your moon base and inside your buildings. When you have to lose people, they come from your base first. If there aren’t enough people there, you must lose a building, move the people printed on that building back to your base, resolve any lost ability, and then continue taking losses if needed. So, let’s say you have a nice little colony going, with a few buildings working together, and then a bad event appears at exactly the wrong time. Suddenly one building has to go, and it’s not just a lost card. It might also break a useful combo, remove an ability you were relying on, or leave you short on resources later.
The game ends in one of two ways. If a colony is completely wiped out and has no people left between its base and buildings, the Moon project fails and the game ends immediately. Otherwise, the game continues until the final event is reached, which means the colonies have survived the early mess and are finally established. In both cases, the player with the most surviving people wins.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Moon Colony Bloodbath comes with a lot of cards and tokens. The box includes building cards, perk cards, twist cards, development cards, robot cards, event cards, starting cards, player mats, action chits, deck markers, and cardboard tokens for money, food, resource crates, and people. The player mats are useful and easy to understand, showing your moon base, your starting areas, and the action wheel with the five work actions. They also help keep things tidy, which is welcome, because once your colony starts growing, there can be quite a few cards and tokens on the table.
The building cards are clear, which matters because you are often checking costs, population, stored crates, play effects, and lost effects while your colony is already under pressure. I like that the cards don’t make you fight the graphic design too much. There is already enough fighting against oxygen leaks and robot nonsense. The smaller decks are where the colony starts to feel unstable: developments may help everyone, twists bend the rules a little, events bring the Moon’s problems, and robots usually arrive like they read the job description upside down.
Each scientist has their own set of perk cards, with different artwork and flavour text. They don’t play differently from each other, so you’re not choosing a special power at the start. It’s mostly there for identity and humour, and for me, that’s fine. Not every game needs five different starting abilities and a spreadsheet before round one. The tokens are practical too, especially because crates sit directly on buildings and you don’t have to remember where everything is stored. Food uses apple icons, money has a lunar currency symbol, crates look like supply boxes, and population is shown with portrait tokens.
The artwork by Franz Vohwinkel has a retro science fiction feel. It’s bright, slightly silly, and full of hopeful Moon buildings, scientists, robots, greenhouses, mines, and disasters waiting to happen. I like that the game never becomes too grim, even though people are constantly dying in the background. That sounds darker than it feels. The tone is more “this colony is a disaster” than “this is deeply tragic,” and that lighter look makes the constant disasters easier to laugh at instead of turning the game into something miserable. Without it, all the dying colonists might be a bit much for a cosy game night.
Our Experience
Our first play caught us off guard a little, because we went in wanting to build a good colony, as you usually do in a tableau game. We learned quickly not to fall in love with one building too much. A card that felt important could suddenly disappear, food could become a problem sooner than expected, and the robots were not exactly employee of the month material. Once we stopped treating every setback as a personal insult from the game, we had a much better time with it.
At the table, the shared deck really shaped the way we reacted. Everyone saw the same card, but nobody experienced it in exactly the same way. Hunger could be a small inconvenience for one colony and a proper problem for another. A robot could be annoying for everyone, but especially painful for the player who had just prepared something useful. It made us feel like we were all stuck in the same failing Moon programme, even though everyone was still trying to be the colony that looked least terrible at the end.
One thing we appreciated was how quickly the game moves. Since everyone resolves cards at the same time, there isn’t much waiting around, and that matters a lot here. The game throws problems at you quite often, and because it keeps moving, those problems feel like part of the fun instead of something that slows everything down. If this had long turns with lots of downtime, it would be much harder to enjoy the bad luck. Here, it usually moved on before anyone could stay annoyed for too long, which helped the whole table stay involved.
We also had a few turns where the timing of the deck was so rude that it became funny. Someone would finally get a little setup going, then the next card would arrive and say, “Nice colony. Shame if something happened to it.” Not always fair-feeling, no, but it did give us the kind of table stories we still talked about afterwards.
Our Thoughts
What I like most is that the game doesn’t treat failure as something separate from the fun. Losing people, abandoning buildings, and patching things up again are all part of how the game tells its story. That gives it a different feeling from many tableau builders, where the main pleasure is making your system better and better. Here, the question is not only “How much can I produce?” but also “How much damage can I take before this whole thing becomes a very expensive Moon-themed graveyard?”
After our plays, I wouldn’t try to build the most specialised colony. I’d rather have enough food, spare people, and a few ways to deal with whatever the deck throws at us. A building that protects you from a specific problem, or helps you recover from a loss, can be just as valuable as a building that gives you a bigger reward right now. For us, the interesting part wasn’t only building the strongest card combo, but deciding whether a boring-looking safety card might save more colonists later.
The part I’m less sure about is how much control some players will feel they have. There are decisions, and they do matter, but there are also turns where the deck reveals a problem and you simply have to deal with it. I didn’t mind that much, because the game is honest about being a bit mean, but I can easily see some groups bouncing off that. If you want every problem to have a perfect answer, this may annoy you. I’d also be careful with groups who strongly dislike losing parts of what they built, because this game is not shy about taking your favourite building and sending it into the lunar bin.
But for players who enjoy adapting, laughing at bad situations, and seeing a game create stories through failure, this can be a very memorable one. It is also one of the three official nominees for the prestigious 2026 Kennerspiel des Jahres, alongside Boss Fighters QR and Rebirth. After playing it, we can definitely see why. Moon Colony Bloodbath is easier to get into than the title suggests, but it stayed in our heads afterwards because your colony never feels completely safe. For us, it was enjoyable because things went wrong, not despite that. And honestly, for a game with “Bloodbath” in the title, that feels about right.
📝 We received a review copy of Moon Colony Bloodbath from Rio Grande Games.
