Review: Lunar Skyline (Dead Alive Games)

Growing up in the Midwest meant that when you pulled out a deck of cards, you almost always played some variant of a trick-taking game like Euchre, Spades, or Hearts. After all, there must be a reason so many trick-taking games are considered classics.

Lunar Skyline from Dead Alive Games shoots the trick-taking mechanic into the future by honoring those classic games while twisting some of the details into delicious game night surprises.

There’s a lot of unexpected depth and clever design elements to explore here, so let’s haul out that childhood telescope and focus it toward the future as we look at the top five things you need to know about Lunar Skyline.

Defining the Terms

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Gameplay in Lunar Skyline hinges on two specific terms: round and turn. A round begins when players receive their cards and use one of them to make a bid (more about that later). The round ends when all the dealt cards have been played.

One round contains several turns. On each turn, the lead player puts down a card and the others must follow suit if they can.

Most other common trick-taking terms mean exactly what you expect in the game, like hand, trick, and lead player. The one exception is suit, which works a little differently here and deserves more explanation.

Paired Suits

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Lunar Skyline puts a twist on the classic concept of suits in a card deck. The twist starts with six icons: water, energy, robot, cybernetics, human, and plant. These icons represent the resources available in the game.

A pair of icons makes a card’s suit. But the icons aren’t matched randomly. Instead, they’re matched in order following a circular pattern that subtly reinforces the game’s underlying themes of futuristic technology supporting life in space. (It’s a pretty cool detail to build so deeply into the game.)

For example, the humans icon sits between plants and cybernetics in the pattern, because both of those relate to humans. Thus, the suit of a card with a humans icon is always either cybernetics-human or human-plant.

Starting a Round

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Each round begins by shuffling the deck and dealing the cards. The number of players affects this step, because you always leave some cards out of play.

Players begin the round by secretly choosing a card from their hand as their building bid, then simultaneously revealing their choices.

The card’s number is how many tricks each player wants to take this round. Hitting your bid means getting bonus points. Going over your bid costs you points for every extra trick you sook, while scoring less than your bid means missing out on that round’s bonus opportunities.

Playing a Turn

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The player with the highest bid plays a card onto the lead card board (cleverly, the game box lid). In clockwise order, the other players must follow suit with a card that matches at least one resource icons on the lead card.

A player could also follow suit with an Ace card. Aces have one resource icon and can be played either high or low. A high ace is the highest matching resource card in that trick; a low ace is the lowest.

If a player can’t follow suit, they play any card from their hand (including an ace) and then “smuggle” that card into their resources area where it counts as a trick toward their bid.

The player with the highest matching resource card wins the trick. The trick’s winner takes the cards played (except any smuggled cards) and puts whichever card they want on top of the trick. The resources on that card count toward the round’s bonus points, provided they make or exceed their bid amount

Claiming a Bonus Card

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After each trick, all players see if they have at least as many tricks as their bids. If they do, they claim a contract bonus card.

The bonus cards give points for a variety of things ranging from having specific resource icons on top of tricks you took to the number of smuggled cards you or your opponents have.

Players only claim one bonus card per round (not per turn), so choose your bonus wisely. And you only get a bonus card if you at least make your bid, so choosing the wrong bid number can really hurt.

Verdict

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The extra twists and clever turns that Dead Alive Games baked into the design turned this game into a winner for us. Using paired icons for suits kept players more engaged since they had many more possible plays available. Even when you couldn’t follow suit, figuring out which card to smuggle became a strategic decision since it turned into a trick toward your bid.

The ace cards also made an interesting innovation that subverts the classic trick-taking mechanics. Being able to play a single card as either highest of lowest in a hand is really clever. They also created a delightfully simple mechanism to break any ties in a trick by ruling that the last card played takes precedence. We appreciate simple, elegant solutions like that.

The game also includes an optional mini expansion in the box. It adds a set collection element to the game on top of everything else that’s going on, so we agree with the designer’s recommendation to learn the base game before attempting the expansion.