Space, SF, and Stocks: A Review of Moonbase Alpha

Game Name: Moonbase Alpha

Publisher: Victory Point Games

Designer: Chris Taylor

Year: 2012

Genre: Economically driven lunar wargame

Players: Two players

Ages: 12+

Playing Time: 90 minutes

MSRP: $27.95 (Boxed Edition)

Catch the podcast review right here!

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My first thoughts, when I saw the box art for Moonbase Alpha, was the title looked like a complete throwback to the old Metagaming and Steve Jackson microgames you used to pick up in the 1980s. I have fond memories of many of those little gems, which would normally set you back anywhere from three to five bucks at a crack. After I read the game synopsis I immediately thought of Artifact and the other Reagan era titles which would pit the U.S. and Soviet Union duking it out across the lunar landscape.

Moonbase Alpha replaces the superpowers with powerful megacorporations in a near, alternate future but the battleground remains the same: the Earth’s moon. Yet, this time around it isn’t territory you’re pining away to control but the stock market as you aim to drive you company’s stock price higher while using everything at your disposal to push your opponent’s stocks into the basement.

Players will mine resources, muster military units from Earth, and manipulate the media as each looks to dominate the resources of the moon and make it rain money for their side.

So far so good right?

As with the titles in VPGs Gold Banner line you’ll crack open the box to find those nice extra thick counters, a mounted map, and (what to the naked eye appears to be a concise and well laid out) rule book. Moonbase Alpha has a lower price point than many of the other VPG titles so there aren’t as many bells and whistles as you may find in other releases but still everything’s pretty good all around. I will mention the map is a touch on the bland side but we are talking about the moon here so it isn’t as if I’d expect to be blown away with a dazzling range of colors. All told I was a bit surprised by the overall color scheme selection since nothing really pops as we’ve come to expect with most things of late from the “Little Game Company that Could.”

Each faction begins on opposites sides of the map and start the game with a media unit (Fox News be damned!), two PMCs (mercenary infantry), and a MCU (a robotic combat drone) at their disposal. An interesting aspect of the combat units is the fact you won’t know how effective they are until they engage in battle since you select these randomly and they’re placed on the map without knowing their combat strengths. Units are rated for Strength, Armor, and Movement ability. As the game progresses players will have the opportunity to recruit more combat units as well as crawlers to mine the surface of the moon in order to provide more money during each turn’s budget phase. It will take some time though to finally build up enough units to be able to engage in combat where you have a chance of destroying the enemy.

Players also possess four action tokens which are utilized to plot areas of the map where each plans to perform. One token is actually a dummy counter while the others show one, two, or three stars indicating in what ascending order the actions will take place in those areas. Each turn, a starred action token can also be placed on one of the available Upgrade cards to indicate the player will attempt to research that technology or improvement. The game comes with twenty five Upgrades cards and each player will draw five of them to have available to research during the game.

The gist of the game is to drive your stock price up while helping to bottom out your opponent’s stock. The main way of doing this is by winning battles, in which there’s media coverage, as investors will lose faith. This can be tricky though as the media can bite you if you roll poorly and end up losing.

The timing mechanism for Moonbase Alpha is the Lawsuit Settlement track which advances along once each turn although this can be manipulated, by spending cash and rolling dice, to either lengthen or shorten the game. Once you reach the end of the track the game ends and the player with the highest stock price wins a minor victory. A major victory can be achieved by doubling your initial stock value of 800 euros to 1600 euros or causing your opponent’s stock to hit zero.

While I’m a fan of luck coming into play with most games there seems to be just a bit too much left to chance within Moonbase Alpha; draw less than stellar Upgrades cards and you’re stuck, roll poorly when you try for an upgrade and you’re stuck, screw the pooch with your combat rolls and you’re stuck, blow your saving rolls to avoid combat losses and you’re stuck. Keep in mind I said stuck rather than screwed because it never seems bad rolls completely cripple you but rather lead to an ongoing stagnant situation.

This isn’t to say Moonbase Alpha can’t be fun, because it can, and I know there’s a core of gamers out there who will find the title to be right up their alley. I personally found the game is too slow in ramping up to the point you feel you’re accomplishing anything while also having a playtime about 30 minutes longer than the action warrants. Much of the time combat doesn’t provide decisive results which also leads one to feel as if they’re just spinning their wheels.

Full disclosure here, Moonbase Alpha came out about a year ago and when it was originally released I thought the system was pretty broken. It didn’t help the matter any that the rules were a bit of a jumble – missing some key mechanics – which really made combat tedious and the game drag on and on and on. Thankfully, the rules have been corrected, although they still aren’t as concise as they should be. I certainly won’t say the title is a bad game by any stretch and I’m sure quite a few people will really dig it. There are some interesting concepts such as not knowing how good your units will be until they fight for the first time, media coverage providing a boon or bane to your stock prices, not using just control of territory to determine victory.

Yet for all the neat little mechanics of Moonbase Alpha I still have the impression the design is pretty undercooked. A few tweaks here and there could turn the title into a really solid little SF game (possibly increasing the amount of money each turn so you can build units faster, changing combat results to be more decisive, and shaving off a few turns from the Lawsuit Track) that you could bang out with a friend in a little more than an hour. As it stands now though Moonbase Alpha is just okay and while it’s a game with appeal, that appeal won’t be universal.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...

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