Matthew BaileyMoonlight Castle has been out for about a year or so in Germany as “Mondschein Helden” but has recently been released in English (well it’s pretty much language independent so it’s been released with Moonlight Castle written on the box and English first in the rulebook).
Moonlight Castle is quite an unusual game that reminds me of something such as Splendor or Century Spice Roads crossed with a bit of Dice Forge.
Thematically you play as an adorable woodland creature trying to save the gems from being stolen by the evil wizard (I was shocked to see this time around Haba has not used that very familiar Haba gem mould).
The gems are on tiles that are shuffled, stacked, and placed inside a cardboard castle (that was fun to build). Using a plastic slider that goes under the bottom edge of the castle, players push out tiles to create a row of gems that the wizard is levitating away from the castle. This slider mechanism is very cool and is very fun to use. You can see Jack(7) using it in one of the attached videos. This type of blind push mechanism needs to be used in more games.
Each player starts with four coloured pebbles. On your turn, you move your figure to a new space on the path of tiles, paying a pebble of the colour space to which you move. You then draw pebbles from the bag based on the space to which you moved. Finally, if you can pay pebbles exactly matching the number and colour of the gems depicted on the tile, you claim that tile. (You have tricked the wizard into stealing pebbles instead of gems.) You can also go to fountains which let you pick up more pebbles but without the option to claim a gem tile.
Reveal the bottom of the tile to see whether nothing happens, a number of new tiles are revealed, or you take another turn. Continue taking turns until the magic path tile is revealed from the castle. At the end of that round, count your gems to see who wins.
This is a good game to work up to something like Splendor or Century. There are also extra fountains you can add that give you slightly more complicated rules but we didn’t play with those.
As usual for Haba production values are excellent and the game has fantastic table presence. The meeples are wonderful and the board and castle perfectly fit together. The way the tiles slide out is the star of the show and the children will love doing it. interestingly they have gone with a matt printed board and tokens as opposed to the usual shiny or neutral. It’s an odd choice but it adds to the quality feel of the game. As always with Haba I get a little annoyed they don’t have anything that vaguely resembles an insert in their games but this overall has really high production values.
I would definitely recommend this game if you are looking for a game to introduce these types of mechanics.
Big thumbs up.
