Lunar Rush Game Review

Written by Charlie Theel

Lunar Rush is an economic game focused on logistics. This type of experience can be a dull one, more concerned with bean counting than excitement or drama. I assume that’s why it’s set on the moon, embracing a storyline that is similar to the most recent season of the streaming series For All Mankind. This certainly helps spark some life into the machinery and frame the central puzzle around an intriguing concept.

In this competitive affair, players compete to establish bases and mining operations on the lunar surface. The goal is to ship material from Earth to the moon, use it to construct buildings, and then utilise industrial might to ship rare minerals back to Earth for profit. It’s both a narrative and game loop that is compelling.

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Play Lunar Rush Game

The heart of the game is the coupling of bidding with limited shipping space. Each round players bid money–which also serves as victory points–to secure various transports that will embark to and from the moon. These spacecraft balance speed with hold space, providing a central trade-off of getting your material to and back from the moon faster, or shipping more of it. The slowest shuttle takes three rounds to arrive and three to return, while the fastest arrives in the same round.

One interesting twist is that all of the resources you ship to the moon are free. These are used in the middle phase of the game, where players run their own personal tableaus and construct buildings from the material shipped in. The only concern for these items is space on your shuttle and the time it takes to get there. If you take a slow option, you must plan out your buildings in advance so that you can yield substantial growth on the turns when your large shipments arrive. It’s a neat logistical challenge that can produce joyful moments.

In addition to crafting buildings, each player also simultaneously utilises their workforce on the moon. You have a limited number of astronauts that can be assigned to your various constructions. This is a simple worker placement mechanism that produces various minerals to be shipped back to Earth and sold on the open market. Part of the appeal here is that it’s incredibly fast as you can only assign workers to your personal buildings, allowing everyone to work simultaneously and save a great deal of time.

The final phase of play is selecting return craft, again using the previous bid results and player’s sacrificing hold space for time. The idea is to ship the precious resources back to Earth and time the markets appropriately, as the player-driven prices fluctuate depending on how many have been sold previously in the game. This is a compelling concept, but it’s not adroit in practice.

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Lunar Rush Game Review

One of the issues with Lunar Rush is that with each successive phase of play, the game loses a bit of its sparkle. The initial bidding is fantastic. There’s a meaningful decision space and the logistics puzzle is fun to tinker with. The simultaneous building and worker phase is less exciting. It’s very standard stuff for this style of game, and none of the buildings change play-to-play. This, combined with symmetry between player construction options, means it’s a somewhat rote exercise. Finally, the return shipment is almost completely devoid of agency. Beyond making a quick immediate shipment with the fastest ship, you have no idea what will be worth what in future rounds. In practice, this means you build whatever you can in as large a quantity as you can, and you hope for the best when it actually sells.

Lunar Rush is a tough sell, because it has clever bits and offers a full experience in a relatively quick 90 minutes. But it also fails to really present much new or exciting beyond that logistics system. This harms its position when competing with the vast quantity of modern board games and ultimately leaves it in a precarious spot.

Should you play Lunar Rush? Maybe. If the core logistics puzzle sounds fascinating, it may be enough to carry the experience for you. Otherwise, you’re better off passing this one over.

You could try this if you liked Maglev Metro. While both games are not entirely similar, they do share an identical focus on completing efficient deliveries. There are some parallel sensations here, and they touch on comparable concepts.

Buy Lunar Rush on Amazon

The Box

Designer: Steven “Skippy” Brown

Publisher: Dead Alive Games

Time: 45-75 minutes

Players: 1-4

Age: 13+

Price: £57

• Game board
• 4 Player boards
• 3 Double sided market boards
• Initiative board
• 214 Cards
• 41 Meeples
• 153 Cubes
• 21 Tokens
• Rulebook

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