Kosmos Two Player Game Series - Blue Moon by Reiner Knizia

Our eleventh game was a new acquisition, Blue Moon, the third Knizia game we've played, after Lost Cities and Ingenious. Blue Moon may seem very familiar as we often play its multi-player sequel game, Blue Moon City, at GCOM Germantown.

Blue Moon is a card game where players fight a series of battles, each turn playing one character card plus an optional booster card or support card to reach a certain combat value in either fire or earth. The other player must then play his own character, plus a booster or support, and match or beat that combat value. The players play back and forth this way until one player can't or won't play any more cards and retreats. Of course, many of the cards have special powers which allow for a wide variety of effects like removing enemy cards from the table, not having to meet the combat value, restricting the other player's actions, or drawing additional cards into your hand. Finding good combinations of cards is the strategic heart of the game.

The winner of the fight attracts from 1-3 dragons to their side of the table. Once one player's deck has completely run out, the player with dragons on their side of the table wins the battle and 1-4 crystals. The first player to five crystals wins the game.

The great thing about Blue Moon is the decks of cards. The game comes with two unique, 31 card decks, each representing one of the races of the world of Blue Moon, in this case, the Hoax and the Vulca. Each deck has strengths and weaknesses and plays out differently, but they're incredibly balanced. While the base game has only two decks, Fantasy Flight issued nine others. All are out of print and hard to find, but we liked the game so much I managed to locate several more and so we now have many decks to play.

During our first battle, I managed to overwhelm Carol completely, drawing all three dragons to my side of the board and then attracting one more, ending the battle immediately and scoring four crystals, just one away from victory.  We switched decks and Carol fought back, winning the second battle but only attracting one dragon. Switching decks again, she won another two crystals in that battle, making the score 4 to 3.

During the final round, Carol managed to dominate, not only taking the two dragons she needed to win, but taking all three and attracting a fourth for the full four crystals. I had won the first four crystals of the game but never scored again.

Final scores:

     Carol     7
     Bob       4

Coming up:  We experience an African marketplace in Jambo.