Nova Luna

My friends and I have discovered we really like tile-placing games and this was a great addition to our collection. The turn choosing mechanic where whoever is furthest back/on top of the stack goes next allows for strategic tile selection where you can try to give yourself as many turns as possible. It's always amusing how quiet we get when playing this showing how much we're concentrating on our tile selection. Would definitely recommend!

This is one of Rosenberg's lighter games with a similar feel to Patchwork. As with that game you move along a track based on the tiles you select with the player at the back taking the next turn. That gives someone the possibility of having 2 or 3 turns in a row.

The game is very abstract: place tiles next to each other and when a task on a tile has been completed based on adjacent tiles, cover the task with a disc. The first player to use all 20 discs wins.

Having previously been tempted by the Habitats Kickstarter I was very surprised to see it reimplemented as Nova Luna. I know, as an abstract game, it may not appeal to everyone but I liked the more simplistic, colourful, visual aesthetic. Very glad to now have a copy and it has been enjoyed by all. It has felt very well balanced with our regular gaming group as we have all been very close at the end of the game. We'd probably say it is the same level of difficulty as Azul, easy to learn, hard to master! It seems so straightforward, you pick a tile within 3 spaces of the moon and place it in front of you, move your token around the moon track equal to the number on the tile you picked and move the moon to the now empty tile space. Play continues with whoever is farthest behind on the moon track, like Tokaido if you're familiar. Subsequent tiles have to be placed orthogonally adjacent to a previously placed tile. The difficult part is configuring the tiles to complete each other's objectives that are shown on them. A blue tile may want to be adjacent to 3 reds (groups count for this) but those reds will probably want to be adjacent to different combinations of yellow and turquoise too. Whoever completes 20 of their objectives first is the winner. Nice little game, my only complaint is that it could have been made to fit in a smaller box, but shelf space is always at a premium in our house!

Enjoyable tense game

Enjoying this unusual game. Beautifully made.