French Game Round-up: Ditch Zombie Cards, Avoid Bad Hits, and Welcome Others to the Moon

You've built housing for humanity in neighborhoods and New Las Vegas. Now you need to save humanity through space colonization...

Welcome to the Moon uses the same flip-and-write game mechanisms as the earlier title Welcome To..., but now you can play in a campaign across eight adventure sheets. On a turn, you flip cards from three stacks to create three different combinations of a starship number and a corresponding action, then all players choose one of these three combinations. You use the number to fill a space in a zone on your adventure sheet in numerical order, and everyone is racing to be the first to complete common missions.


The eight adventure sheets feature very different mechanisms from the classic Welcome To... concept, and when you play in campaign mode, you'll make choices that change the next adventure, which means that each campaign will differ from the previous one.

Summer nights, the woods, and the campfires where it is good to roast marshmallows — what happiness!


Well, almost! Suddenly, out of the bushes, hordes of zombie animals are rushing towards you. Do they want to steal your marshmallows? Not at all! It's your brains they want to cube and roast over the campfire. Your goal in Oh My Brain is to rid yourself of these assailants — that is, the cards in your hand — as quickly as possible to avoid gradually losing your mind because losing your brain entirely means being transformed into a zombie...and losing the game!

The card deck consists of cards numbered 0-19, and to start a round of play each player takes three cards from the deck and places one in their "campfire" (a card holder) and the other two in their hand. They then do this twice more to have a hand of six cards and a campfire of three cards. Each player starts with a number of brain tokens.

On a turn, you must play to the central pile, playing a number higher than the current highest number. You can play multiple copies of the same number, and if you do, you place all copies of that number after the first one into the campfire of one or more opponents. You can always play a 0, which restarts the pile. If you play an 8, the next player must play lower than an 8, then the pile ascends again. If you play an 11, you take another turn. If you play certain high or low cards, you must roll the special die, which may have you play again, steal a brain from another player, swap campfires with an opponent, or take some other action.


If you cannot play, you lose a brain token, clear the pile, draw two cards, place one of those cards in your campfire, then start the pile again by playing from your hand. If you have fewer than three cards in hand at the end of a turn, refill your hand to three from the cards in your campfire. If you have played all of your cards, success! You have fended off the zombie animals, and all opponents lose a brain token for each card in their hand and campfire. If any player has no brains remaining, the player with the most brain tokens wins; otherwise, shuffle the cards and play another round, starting with the player who has the fewest brains.

In HIT !, you draw cards to get points — but you don't want to draw too often because then you might lose all your gains!


In more detail, the 90-card deck contains eleven cards each numbered 1-5 and seven cards each numbered 6-10. On a turn, you flip over a card from the deck and place it in front of you, stealing (if you wish) all the cards of the same number that are in front of other players. You can stop after each draw, or you can draw another card. If you draw a number that you already have lying in front of you — and you have at least three cards in front of you — then you discard all cards in front of you from the game.

At the start of your turn, if you have cards in front of you, place them face down in a personal score pile, then start your turn. When the draw pile is exhausted, all players place all the cards they have in front of themselves in their score piles, then they tally the numbers on all their scored cards. Whoever has the highest sum wins.