Lunar Skyline
- Board's Eye View
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Trick-taking card games always go down well at Board's Eye View; not least because they are usually intuitively easy to learn. Recent years have seen a huge amount of innovation brought to trick-taking, adding novel elements that breathe fresh life into this tried and tested core mechanic. Case in point, Dead Alive Games' Lunar Skyline, designed by Charlie McCarron with art from Alex Pei, Maria Zvonkova and Zachary Leo.
There's an underlying theme about collecting resources and developing buildings on the moon but, other than feeding into the pun which we'll come to shortly, the theme is really just there for atmosphere and flavour; the game could readily have been reframed around any theme. Lunar Skyline is a contract bidding game for 2-6 players. It's played with a deck of 66 cards: 1-10 in each of six coloured suits plus six Ace Pilot cards. And there's the pun: the Pilots function as Aces - playable either higher or lower than all of the numbered resource cards that share their icon.
Some numbers are filleted out of the deck if you are playing with fewer than five players, and not all cards will be in play in every round (some are left undealt). The USP for Lunar Skyline is that each suit has two resource icons with each resource icon being present in two suits; so, for example, the energy resource is on both the red and orange suits but in red it is paired with water and in orange it is paired with the robot icon. When a card is led, other players must follow if they can with a card showing either of the resources on the lead card. Because of the way in which resources each appear in two suits, that means you can follow with a card in any of three suits.
Accurately predicting the number of tricks you'll win is critical. You place your bid by placing face-up one of the cards from your hand. That card won't be available to you in the subsequent tricks but it will show the number of tricks you are expecting to make. The resource icons on the card are also important because you'll score points for those icons if they show on the top card of any of the tricks you win (win a trick and you get to choose which card goes on top). During a round if you meet your bid, you get to choose a card that will give you bonus scoring. That means underbidding can be costly. It's costly too to overbid, however: if you end the round with more tricks than you predicted, you have to discard tricks and at a cost of a 2 point penalty per trick.
And there's more. If, on a trick, you cannot play a card that follows either of the resource icons on the lead card, you get to 'smuggle' a card (ie: play any other card). In most trick-taking games, cards that don't follow suit are effectively discarded. Not so in Lunar Skyline. Instead each card you 'smuggle' counts as one of your own tricks, contributing towards your bid and to end-of-round icon scoring. You'll need to factor in the prospect of any 'smuggled' tricks in working out how much to bid at the start of each round...
Tho' there are aspects here that are novel, the gameplay is straightforward. But the dual-resource suits, icon scoring and the 'smuggled' tricks add a subtlety to both the contract bidding and card play that takes the trick-taking to a new level. There's often an element of deduction in trick-taking games as players work out from card play what suits others still have in hand. With the 'smuggled' tricks that's greatly heightened in this game.
Lunar Skyline plays comfortably in a filler-length 30 minutes. If you play with just two players, you each have to play two cards to each trick - which means the player leading a trick can set themselves up with a 'smuggle' action on the same trick, giving an additional strategic dimension to the two-player game. The game feels more exciting tho' at higher player counts, with players keen to nab valuable contract bonus cards - sometimes as much to avoid opponents being able to rack up their scores.
Dead Alive have taken a lot of care over the production of the game. The Deluxe edition even has plastic cards. The cards tho' have dark edges which mean they're likely to show the slightest nick, so, as with all games with borderless dark cards, this is a game that we'd recommend sleeving. That should do the trick.
