Review: LUNAR OUTPOST Is an Easy and Chill Cooperative Board Game
Ravensburger recently released the cooperative board game Lunar Outpost. The game was made in partnership with NASA Astronaut Dan Tani and has players work together to build an outpost on the moon. If this sounds fun, you can grab a copy from Amazon now for $34.99. Ravensburger was kind enough to send me a copy of the game to review, but what you’ll find below are my own thoughts. Also, before getting into it, I must disclaim that this game does support Amazon Alexa, but I did not try out that feature as I don’t have any Alexa devices.
Lunar Outpost is a fairly simple game at its heart. The game is divided into rounds and then each player will take a number of actions in each round. The game’s default setting gives you 12 rounds, but you can adjust up to 15 rounds to make the game easier or even shorten the number to make more of a challenge for yourself. Each round starts with the players drawing an Event card which may provide good fortune or sometimes misfortune, creating the mining area for the round where you get materials for the modules you need to construct, and giving players Crew cards which give you more options for your turn. Then, in order, players take one turn at a time exhausting Life Support cubes with each turn. The round starts with one Life Support per player, but different cards can alter this throughout the turns. You continue with this until you win or can’t draw any more Event cards.
Sounds simple, right? That’s because it is. But that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes simple games give you a lot of fun. Lunar Outpost was a very chill game for me and my group. I never worried that we weren’t going to make it, but like I said, you can always adjust the difficulty if you feel it’s necessary. The different pieces look and feel very nice and the fact that you have 4 different types of outposts to aim for (you pick before starting) helps add some variety.
Sadly, there are some things that I wasn’t a fan of. The rules don’t always feel very clear. For instance, it says that to build Middle Ring modules, you need to first complete the Inner Ring. However, it has a game mode where you try to build all three rings including the Outer Ring, but doesn’t say whether or not you have to complete the Middle Ring to start building the Outer Ring. There are also some cards that I wish had a bit more clarification on them. An example is a card that states, “When taking any Build action add a Life Support to the Lunar Dome.” The missing comma aside, I wish it was more clear whether that was just for the player that used the card or if it was for the team. I know some of these things seem like “no duh” moments, but it can go a long way to settling debates and putting some minds at ease.
A small complaint that I have is that the box is huge compared to the actual game pieces. I appreciate being able to fit everything in, but it feels a little empty. If expansions are released, it is nice knowing it would probably fit in the base box.
Another gripe I have is that you’re limited to three Crew cards in your hand, but every round starts with you getting a card and there are very few ways to get rid of cards outside of playing them. This means your hand fills up very quickly. Something I haven’t mentioned is that at the start of the game, everyone gets a Role which tells you how many points you have in each of the three areas (Biology, Engineering, Research). This in turn affects how effective you are with different Crew cards. Overall, I like this system, but sometimes, you get stuck with cards that you only have one point in, and they aren’t very good for your situation. I think it would be great if you could clean up your hand at the end of a round or something.
My final complaint is that the game feels way too easy. This one is going to vary from person to person and group to group, so take it with a grain of salt. Yes, you can adjust the difficulty, but it’s so easy to get extra Life Support which means extra turns in a round. Now, you are limited because you have a finite number of Life Support cubes, but there were a few times we maxed out or got really close to maxing out on turns and essentially had nothing left to do, but cards we played kept giving us Life Support. It feels like 75% of the Event cards give you extra Life Support (I don’t have an exact number, that’s a guess).
At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a very simple cooperative game that won’t make you feel like you can’t win, Lunar Outpost is great. It’s a fun and very easy game with well-made pieces. The theme is really cool, too. There were just some aspects that I thought could’ve been tuned a bit better.
