Let’s check those vibes! This time we’re looking over Moonrollers, published by IV Studio. It’s a push your luck game, based in the same universe of their deckbuilder Moonrakers. So it’s a different version of one of my favorite games. Almost the opposite? While Moonrakers is a big and complicated “co-petitive” deckbuilder, Moonrollers is a quick and simple push your luck dice game… and it’s just as finely tuned as I’d expect from this team.
Like most IV Studio games, Moonrollers has a slick and minimalist style art and graphic design. By the second or third round, you understand all the information on the cards and can easily comprehend the icons at a glance. (Yes, I’m a big fan of their work.)
In Moonrollers, you’re rolling dice to generate resources that you’re assigning to contracts. If you complete a requirement, you gain points when that contract is completed, regardless of whether or not you’re the one to complete the contract. This makes it so chaotic and fun! A strategy I didn’t think of until too late was to get some requirements completed on multiple contracts so my opponent would have to consider giving me points if they wanted to complete that contract. Because if I can’t win, I can at least be petty.
Contracts give you crew members, which give you special abilities to manipulate the results of the dice. The game ends when someone completes a contract for each faction, or three contracts of the same faction. So you can be REALLY petty by rushing the end condition
…except we haven’t discussed Hazards, which you acquire sometimes when fulfilling requirements. Hazards are secret tokens you get which could give you prestige points, or prestige points AND hazard points. At the end of the game, if you have the most Hazard points, you don’t get to score ANY prestige points from the hazards you might be hoping for.
So there’s a lot of back and forth, secret gambles, and the risk/reward stress that comes with a good push your luck game.
As far as vibes go, it was wild that this little game felt so much like Moonrakers. There were a few times in the beginning where we needed to check the rulebook for “I think that’s right?” moments, but we got what was going on pretty quickly.
It feels like it’s worth mentioning that I only played this with two players (three if you count our cat, Egg). Moonrollers plays two to five players, and I think it would be CRAZY chaos with a full player count.
So overall vibes? This was great in surprising ways. It feels like a quick and casual dice game out of the box, and while it had way more meat on the bone than I was expecting, it still felt quick and simple in a finely honed kind of way as we played it.
