Wow, we played boardgames (Part III: Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon City)

Reiner’s attempt to water down Magic: the Gathering into a game playable by the general gaming crowd was less than impressive. (Read: Blue Moon is underwhelming.) This attempt at franchise-building a-la Catan isn’t unusual, but the product has to measure up. On the heels of a Deutsch novel to further support the world-building of the card game, Kosmos released a standalone boardgame. Fortunately, this game is far, far better than the card game.

Blue Moon City (BMC) is set after the war among the races of the setting as represented in the card game. After the conflict, the races come together to rebuild the city. Yeah, so the theme is flaky. This is one of those games that didn’t begin with the theme.

However, Reiner knocked another one out of the park with BMC’s mechanisms and gameplay. This is a nice, light tactical game that fuses the “cards with powers” mechanism (more of the card-driven wargame style rather than the Magic: the Gathering style) with a quirky flavor of area majority. It results in a game that allows players to be creative without requiring a lot of forward planning. It’s quick and pleasant and occasionally surprising. BMC got Reiner another nomination for the Spiel des Jahres, but in true Spielberg/Scorsese fashion the prize was given to the significantly inferior Seyfarth effort Thurn & Taxis.

I first encountered BMC at the historic meetup between myself, the esteemed Gil Hova and the legendary Joe Gola. Joe dubbed BMC “The Mysterious Game of Mystery” that he would bring to the game session in New Jersey. We played the game three-handed and enjoyed ourselves so much that I decided that I wanted to have a copy of the game. It took over half a year since Fantasy Flight issued the English edition of the game for my order to make it across the world.

The game is simple, really. The “board” is made up of a bunch of tiles representing buildings. The tiles start with the “broken” side up, and each has 1 to 4 numbered squares representing resources needed to restore that building. Restoring a building rewards players with more resources, including crystals, which are currency used to win the game. Players spend crystals to claim spots on an obelisk, with later spots costing more crystals. Once a player has claimed a set number of spots (determined by number of players) he wins the game.

The engine of the game is the cardplay. Cards in BMC are dual-purpose. They each have a color and a numerical value, which are used to determine which buildings they can be used to rebuild. Cards with values below 3 also have special powers. The powers generally allow flexibility to the movement of player tokens, flexibility in which cards can be used to rebuild which buildings, and moving the dragons.

Dragons? Oh yeah. It looks like Kosmos had a surplus of those plastic dragons used in the Blue Moon card game, so they were worked into this game too. The dragons allow players to accumulate dragon scales, which are simply a mechanism to award bonus crystals to players. Didn’t have to be dragons, but why not when you probably have a warehouse full of ‘em?

One interesting aspect of the game is how players are rewarded just for participating in fixing a building. There’s a bonus for highest contributor, but just being there is usually worthwhile. This is boosted by the bonus for fixing a building that’s beside other buildings that have already been repaired. It’s a sort of cooperative-competitive dynamic that can be very entertaining as more and more buildings are completed and the crystals come rolling in.

All in all, BMC fits in that nice little 45- to 60-minute niche occupied by other fine Reiner games such as Samurai, Modern Art,  RA, Through the Desert and Traumfabrik. The clever cardplay and board interaction keeps dyed-in-the-wool gamers engaged, while the less obsessive can just marvel at the nice pictures and still be competitive.

We played a four-handed game of BMC. The Frog got the jump on everyone by completing two of the solo-5 buildings early, in the northwest area of the board. I was seeding the eastern side of the city, hoping that The George would help and complete them. No such luck as she didn’t have the cards and migrated to where Nix and The Frog were. A quick succession of completions on the western end of the city produced a windfall of stuff for everyone but me! The Frog made out like a bandit, cornering the dragon scales twice while I was caught with less than three scales at least twice. Reiner was right, his way is far more brutal, but significantly more interesting. I’m glad that I taught the game with his original ruleset.

Everyone but The George decided to hoard crystals and only visited the Obelisk to cash in most of their crystals late in the game. The Frog used the double-offering cards to his advantage, taking three obelisk slots in quick succession to win the game.

BMC was a hit with everyone (especially The George). I’m sure that we’ll be playing again soon as opportunity allows.