Moon Colony Bloodbath
Build your dream Moon colony. Then try to keep it alive as the shared deck fills with famine, mechanical failures and catastrophes.
Moon Colony Bloodbath is a 2025 card game designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, the designer of Dominion. Each player develops a lunar settlement, but a single shared Progress deck controls when everyone can work and when catastrophe strikes. Your machines, farms and laboratories can help — until a bad event forces you to sacrifice buildings and their inhabitants.
The winner is the player with the most surviving people when the game ends. Those survivors include people printed on standing buildings, not merely population tokens on your Moon Base.
Why this game stands out
Instead of building an engine that improves continuously, you build an engine that may disintegrate. Every new Trouble card makes future shuffles more dangerous, yet buildings that improve your economy also shelter valuable colonists. The central decision is how much to invest in growth before protecting what you already have.
Game at a Glance
Reveal
Turn over the next card of the shared Progress deck.
Work
When Work appears, everyone chooses an action simultaneously.
Survive
Trouble adds escalating events, including disasters that cost people.
Count Survivors
Population on the base and printed on surviving buildings determines victory.
How to play Moon Colony Bloodbath
Every turn revolves around the Progress deck. Reveal its next card and have every player resolve it. No one takes a normal personal turn in clockwise order; the shared deck sets the rhythm for everyone.
The deck begins with Work and Trouble cards alongside two randomly selected Twists. As play continues, Events, Robots, Developments and personal Perks can be added. Many of those cards remain in the cycle whenever the deck is reshuffled.
The result is an increasingly unpredictable sequence: several useful Work cards may let you expand, or multiple disasters can arrive before you obtain the resources needed to recover.
Setup: starting population and resources
- Give each player a Moon Base playmat and a starting population of 30 people.
- Give everyone 4 money, 4 food and four Building cards.
- Give each player the appropriate set of five personal Perks and action markers.
- Shuffle two chosen Twists with the four Work cards and two Trouble cards to create the initial Progress deck.
- Prepare the separate Building, Robot, Development and ordered Event supplies.
The scientist identities are mechanically identical in the standard game, so character choice does not create an asymmetric starting power.
The shared Progress deck explained
| Card type | Effect on play |
|---|---|
| Work | Every player takes one chosen action. |
| Trouble | Adds the next numbered Event to the top of the deck. |
| Event | Introduces a rule or disaster; many events can kill colonists. |
| Robot | Often causes population loss and additional effects. |
| Development | Shared benefit or penalty introduced by an ability. |
| Perk | Personal benefit for its owner when revealed. |
| Twist | Changes the baseline rules for the game. |
Cards added to the Progress deck are normally placed on top and can resolve immediately. Once the deck has been exhausted, shuffle its discard pile for another pass. This is not conventional deck building: no player owns or draws a private action deck.
All five Work actions
When Work appears, every player independently chooses one of the following actions. They resolve their actions, including applicable building abilities, before the next Progress card is revealed.
| Action | Base effect | Typical reason |
|---|---|---|
| Restock | Place 2 boxes onto buildings | Prepare box-powered effects |
| Build | Pay a building’s money cost and play it | Add abilities and housed population |
| Mine | Gain 4 money | Finance construction |
| Farm | Gain 4 food | Prepare for Hunger |
| Research | Draw 2 Building cards | Find better building options |
Common confusion: The starting deck contains four Work cards, but there are five possible Work actions. “Restock” is easy to overlook because it depends on having buildings that can hold boxes.
Buildings: stronger engines and extra population
Buildings can improve base actions or grant special effects when played, when lost or when particular events occur. Some effects are optional and require resources such as food or boxes.
Every building also has a printed population. Those people count toward your score while the building stands. If the building is destroyed or sacrificed, its printed people move onto your playmat before the required population loss is resolved.
This creates a subtle tradeoff: a building with modest economic value can still be useful because it houses colonists, but losing it may expose your engine to further failures.
What are boxes for?
Boxes represent supplies stored on buildings. A Restock action gives you two, but they cannot be placed directly on your Moon Base. Building abilities and certain Developments let you spend boxes for additional effects.
Because boxes disappear when their host building is lost, spreading them across multiple structures may reduce the risk of losing everything to one catastrophic event. On the other hand, concentrating boxes on a particularly powerful building can make a key combo easier to trigger.
Trouble, Hunger, Robots and escalating disasters
The two starting Trouble cards repeatedly add the next Event from the numbered Event pile. The first Event, Hunger, illustrates why the economy cannot focus only on money and construction.
When Hunger happens, each building requires one food. For each building you cannot feed, you lose one person. If you feed them all without losing population, you gain two people on your Moon Base.
Later Events bring paperwork, robot glitches and direct population loss. Robots can be inserted into the shared deck, and their appearance can cause deaths before their additional effects resolve. Those hazards are not isolated one-off surprises: they can return when the Progress deck cycles.
How losing people actually works
Population losses are paid from your Moon Base playmat first, not directly from printed building populations. If you have insufficient people on the playmat, you must lose a building, moving its printed population onto the playmat. You continue losing buildings as needed until you can pay the loss or the colony fails.
For example, suppose a disaster costs six people, but your base has only two. You may have to sacrifice a building that houses five people. Those five transfer to your base; you then pay six, leaving one person from the combined pool and one fewer building providing abilities.
When a building is lost, its stored boxes are also lost and any applicable LOST ability resolves. You cannot normally discard a building voluntarily simply because you want to activate that ability.
When does Moon Colony Bloodbath end?
The game ends when one colony has no people remaining, or when the final Instruction Manual Event is reached.
At that point, compare every player’s surviving population: people tokens on their Moon Base plus the population values printed on buildings still standing. The largest population wins, even if the triggering catastrophe destroyed another player’s settlement.
This is a race to sustain a population, not a contest to own the most buildings or hoard the most money.
Official solo mode
Solo play uses the standard setup with an additional Loneliness card shuffled into the initial Progress deck. Rather than comparing surviving colonists against rivals, you try to survive until the Instruction Manual Event appears.
If the colony collapses first, the highest numbered Event introduced before your defeat becomes your performance measure. Players who regularly succeed can use the rulebook’s extended solo challenge, which introduces additional Robots beyond the normal ending.
Loneliness interacts with symbols on buildings, making the balance of your construction choices especially important in solo play.
Eight strategy principles for survival
- Do not confuse money with safety. A rich colony can still starve when Hunger returns.
- Build population, not just production. Printed building populations matter directly to the final result.
- Preserve useful building abilities. Sometimes sacrificing a less essential building is better than losing an engine piece.
- Keep food proportional to building count. Every additional building raises the next Hunger obligation.
- Expect Events to recur. Treat disasters already introduced as recurring risks, not completed threats.
- Restock for a purpose. Boxes that have no spending ability are an inefficient use of Work.
- Value action synergies. Buildings that improve a Work action you already use frequently can be more useful than isolated bonuses.
- Plan for abrupt endings. Maximizing surviving people is often better than gambling on an engine that needs several more Work cards.
These are editorial deductions from the rules and card systems, not results of claimed firsthand playtesting.
Moon Colony Bloodbath vs Dominion
Both games come from Donald X. Vaccarino and reward combinations of cards, but they use different structures. Dominion gives every player their own evolving deck, shuffled and drawn individually. Moon Colony Bloodbath instead uses one shared Progress deck that drives simultaneous actions and recurring hazards for everyone.
Dominion focuses on improving a deck to buy valuable cards and score victory points; Moon Colony Bloodbath asks how long an engine can withstand escalating threats while keeping population alive. Enjoying one is a useful clue that you might enjoy the other, but they are not close rules equivalents.
Who should buy Moon Colony Bloodbath?
The game is best suited to players who enjoy surprising interactions, engine-building systems and darkly comic reversals. It is less suitable for players who dislike destructive events, strongly prefer direct control over every turn or want a fully deterministic strategy puzzle.
Rio Grande Games lists the game for 1–5 players, about 45–90 minutes, with an MSRP of $49.95 on its US publisher page. Retail pricing varies by location and may change.
Moon Colony Bloodbath FAQ
How many players does it support?
One to five, including an official solitaire variant.
Who designed the game?
Donald X. Vaccarino, also known for Dominion.
How long does it take?
Rio Grande Games lists 45–90 minutes.
How many Work actions exist?
Five: Restock, Build, Mine, Farm and Research.
Are turns simultaneous?
When the Progress deck reveals Work, all players select and resolve their chosen actions. Other Progress cards are also resolved by all affected players.
Do buildings count toward the final score?
The people printed on surviving buildings do. Buildings are not scored separately as victory points.
What happens when you have too few people to pay a loss?
You must lose buildings, transferring their printed populations to your playmat until you can pay or your colony fails.
Can you store boxes on your Moon Base?
No. Boxes are placed on buildings.
Does the game end when any colony dies?
Yes. It can also end when the Instruction Manual Event is reached.
Is the solo game cooperative?
No. The solo variant is a survival challenge with its own Loneliness card and scoring conditions.
Is it similar to Dominion?
Both use card combinations, but Dominion has separate personal decks while Moon Colony Bloodbath revolves around a shared Progress deck.
Sources and editorial scope
- Rio Grande Games: publisher listing, designer, player count, duration and MSRP
- RulesPal: rulebook text, setup, action economy, Events, buildings, solo and endgame
- BoardGameGeek: game listing and community discussion
Checked October 10, 2026. The rules are summarized in original explanatory language; this article is not a reproduction of the publisher’s rulebook. Strategic commentary is analysis rather than a claimed personal playtest. Editorial policy and corrections.