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I had been looking forward to playing Crescent Moon since it was originally announced in late September 2021, so I was thrilled to receive a review copy from Osprey to get a feel for how it plays.
Crescent Moon is an asymmetric area control game for 4-5 players where players perform actions, often negotiating with one another, to affect a shared map striving to achieve their unique victory objectives. Some players aim to gain military control of certain hexes on the map, while others might be more focused on gaining political control of hexes. Suffice to say, each player has their own motivations, and there's lot of action and intrigue that unfolds on a relatively small map.
The setting of Crescent Moon is based on the dramatic rise and fall of powers across the Midddle East from the 10th century forward, and this is tied together artistically with the beautifully illustrated box cover, cards, and map by Navid Rahman. The art direction was primarily inspired by Middle Eastern art history, as well as Persian traditions that had influence across the region. There are historical notes on the front page of the rulebook which provide a bit more context and also mention that Crescent Moon is more an abstraction of this period rather than an approximation.
Before you jump into a game of Crescent Moon, each player chooses a character to play and takes the corresponding player aid booklet and components (buildings, unit, and influence tokens). The game comes with nifty cloth component bags for each character, which is a nice upgrade included instead of the common plastic bags.
The character player booklets are integral for easing new players into Crescent Moon, and I can see them being helpful even after you've played several games. Each one highlights the corresponding character’s motivations in the world of Crescent Moon and includes strategy tips for new players, details on their available actions, along with unique attributes and scoring objectives. In addition, there are also helpful reference tables for calculating income and summarizing player components which are placed on the board.
In games with asymmetric factions like Crescent Moon, it's important for all players to understand how their opponents score points. While the breakdown of each player’s scoring objectives is clear in the player booklets, it would’ve been super helpful to have a summary of all the characters’ scoring objectives, similar to the faction menus in GMT's COIN games. It also would’ve been great to have these player aids on card stock for better durability. The booklets are already weathered after only three games. In spite of these minor nitpicks, the player booklets are solid player aids and essential for smoothly teaching and learning Crescent Moon.
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After everyone has selected a character, you create the map for your game by arranging a variety of terrain hex tiles and placing starting pieces on the map. There are five different types of terrain hexes (fertile land, wilderness, mountain, quarry, and desert) and some terrain hexes include a feature (holy site, river, or river crossing). The various terrain types impact income, card effects, and victory conditions.
There are five different map setups for each player count, plus there are variable map setup rules for players to create custom maps. I haven’t tried the variable map setup yet, but it reminds me of how you build custom maps in Twilight Imperium since each player gets to place a hex in turn order, after starting with the river crossing hex in the center. For what it's worth, controlling/influencing the holy site hex in Crescent Moon is on par with controlling Mecatol Rex in TI4.
Each of the three preset map setups that I tried had its own feel and offered different strategy options for different characters, noting I did play each game with different players, so that also naturally changed up the feel of each game. Regardless, having the option to use different map setups each game presents fresh challenges for players and cranks up the replay value of Crescent Moon.
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Crescent Moon is played over three years (rounds) for the standard game, or four years if you prefer to play a longer game. Each year is divided into three phases:
---• Preparation, which includes maintenance activities such as income and certain characters adding units to their reserve,
---• Action phase, where players take four actions, one at a time in character order (Warlord, Murshid, Sultan, Caliph, Nomad),
---• and Scoring, where players earn victory points for completing objectives.
Then, after the scoring phase of the final year, the player with the most points wins.
In the Preparation phase, all players collect income from hexes they control that have cities, towns, Sultan influence, or fertile land or quarry terrain. On top of this, the Sultan player gets extra income for all towns, cities, and Sultan influence on the map, regardless of who controls the space. This is one of the unique perks of playing as the Sultan.
After income, the Warlord, Caliph, and Nomad players calculate their reserve value to determine how many units they can add to their reserve card, which is the main way these characters get units onto the map. The Warlod and Caliph player add ordinary units (wooden discs, blank side up) to their reserve, and the Nomad adds mercenary units (wooden discs, camel side up).
Following the reserves step, there’s an upkeep step where players take character and battalion cards back into their hands, and the two power cards from the near market are discarded and the card market is replenished.
In the Action phase, starting with the Warlord, each player takes one action, until all players have taken four actions. There are several common actions, but each character also has one or more unique actions available as well. I'll summarize the more common actions first, then highlight some of each character's special actions and attributes.
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Example of control, influence, and presence
As an example, the hex pictured on the left is controlled by the Warlord (black mercenary unit discs), influenced by the Nomad (camel influence token). The Warlord, Nomad, and Sultan (town/settlement) all have presence since their pieces exist in the hex.
Moving is a straightforward action that you can perform to facilitate spreading influence and gaining control of hexes, as well as better positioning yourself to score objectives. You simply move any number of units from one hex to an adjacent hex where no other player has control. Most characters can do this up to two times, but the Warlord can do it three times. It’s also worth noting there is a limit of five units per hex (or seven if you’re the Warlord).
All characters except the Warlord have a build action available where you can build up to two buildings (or three if you’re the Sultan) on the map following location placement restrictions and paying the applicable cost. For example, you can only build forts in hexes where you have presence, no other player has control, and that do not contain a fort or castle. Whereas if you’re building a castle, you’re actually replacing one of your existing forts on the board and essentially upgrading it to a castle. The Sultan not only has the ability to build three buildings at once, but they also are the only player that can build settlements (towns and cities). Each building has a cost for the different characters, and an additional cost for certain terrain types.
The buy power cards action is the main way you get cards into your hand, and having some cards seems very important in Crescent Moon. When you perform this action you can buy up to four cards – one from the near market, one from the middle market, one from the far market, and one from the Sultan’s market. While the near, middle and far markets have a default associated cost (2 coins, 4 coins, and 6 coins respectively), the cost of the cards and who you pay for the cards varies.
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When you buy power cards, if the card is in the near, middle, or far market you pay the required number of coins to the player aligned with the card. However, if you buy a card from one of the main markets aligned with your own character, you instead pay half the price to the bank. Alternatively, when you buy a card from the Sultan’s market, you agree on a price, and then pay the agreed upon amount of coins to the Sultan, regardless of which character is aligned with the card.
After you buy power cards, they go into your hand and then you replenish the market by sliding all cards to the right and refilling the leftmost empty slots. The indented market boards look nice and fit the theme, but I (and everyone I played with) found they make refilling the card market more tedious than it should be. You have to pick up each card one-by-one and place it in the rightmost empty slot. In the future, I probably won't use the main market boards or I'll place the cards further down below the slots so that we can slide cards for more efficient refilling.
The Sultan’s market is not automatically replenished, however the Sultan has a unique conspire action they can take to refill the entire Sultan’s market. With the conspire action, the Sultan player looks at the top ten cards of the deck and chooses one to fill each empty slot in the Sultan’s market. Then the cards they didn’t select are shuffled and placed at the bottom of the deck.
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The Sultan’s conspire action is slick because the Sultan gets to choose the cards that are in their market. The Sultan is incentivized to pick enticing cards so that players will want to buy them. The better the cards are, the more negotiating leverage the Sultan has to hopefully make good money from the other players so they can build a bunch of towns and cities for victory points. The Sultan can always buy/take a card from the Sultan’s market at no cost, which is another reason for them to pick juicy cards.
There are a variety of power cards – most of them help with combat and/or influence contests, some have actions you can take instead of the ones listed in your player booklet, and others have anytime actions which you can play anytime during the action phase and doesn’t count as one of your actions.
Cards are very helpful in Crescent Moon, especially when engaging in combat and influence contests, which I’ll get into shortly. In a game where you only have twelve total actions (in the standard game), timing when and how often to take the buy power cards action is just about always an important decision. I really appreciate that you can at least buy up to four cards as a single action to be as efficient as possible (assuming you have the money). Also, certain types of cards (character and battalion) can be used once per year/round, whereas event cards are discarded after they’re resolved.
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In Crescent Moon, the influence and assault actions are how you gain influence or control of a hex (respectively). Move any number of your units to an adjacent hex that is controlled by another player to perform an assault action, then resolve combat. For the influence action, you can freely place one of your influence tokens in a hex adjacent to where you have presence if no other player has presence and there is no Murshid influence adjacent to the target hex. Otherwise, you place the challenge token and resolve an influence contest, which has some similarities to combat that occurs from the assault action.
Both combat and influence contests have a handful of steps that you need to resolve. Thankfully reference cards are included for both, so you likely won't need to consult the rulebook after you have some experience with the game. In both cases, all involved players secretly select any number of power cards to contribute, then you resolve the cards after they're simultaneously revealed, calculate the combat/influence strength, and determine who wins. In both cases, if the attacker is successful, they gain control or influence of the space.
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The Warlord moved in to sack the Caliph's palace and castle for 4 VPs
In an influence contest, any player with presence in the targeted hex can participate by contributing power cards, then declare whether they are supporters or defenders against the attacker before the cards are simultaneously revealed. Influence strength is calculated differently than combat strength, but it's the same idea. You tally up the attacker's (plus supporters) and defenders' strength including card modifiers, and determine who wins. If the influence contest is a success for the attacker, they get to place their influence token in the hex, removing anyone else's when applicable.
When it comes to combat and influence contests, there's one little wrinkle I haven't mentioned yet...the Murshid. The Murshid character's victory conditions are centered around spreading influence and their unique attributes allow them to interfere and influence combat and influence contests, which folks referred to as "Candice's BS" (to keep it PG) when I played as the Murshid in my first game.
Ordinarily, if there's a tie in combat or influence contests, the attacker wins. However, if the Murshid has an influence token in the space, they get to decide who breaks the tie. The Murshid also counts as a participant in all influence contests if they have an influence token adjacent to the hex where an influence contest is going down. Other players can make deals with the Murshid for their support in exchange for up to five victory points. Let's say you offer the Murshid two points if they help you in a combat and they agree. Whether the Murshid actually puts in cards to help you or not, you have to give them the two points if you win. The Murshid player might not even have cards that can help, but they are incentivized to do their best to help you win because that's how they can gain some extra points. Thus, there's lots of wheeling and dealing going on in Crescent Moon with this character alone.
My game as the Murshid was filled with many laughs towards the end because everyone knew I didn't have helpful cards, but they still wanted my support in the case of ties. I learned the importance of having a variety of cards in hand, and also that the Murshid spreading too much influence too fast can be dangerous for other players.
Now that you have taste of what makes the Murshid unique, allow me to highlight the other characters special abilities and scoring objectives.
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The Warlord's special Warfare power card
The Caliph's goal is to gain control of as many hexes as possible and assert military dominance. They start the game with a palace on the board which can be moved around with a special move palace action. In addition, building forts and castles is cheaper for the Caliph than the other characters.
The Sultan is the local ruler who has grown powerful and rich from building cities. As I mentioned before, the Sultan has their own card market, is the only player that can build settlements (towns and cities), makes extra income, and can build three times in a single action where others can only build twice. The Sultan scores majority of their points from having cities on the board, preferably under Sultan influence and control.
Finally, we have the Nomad who leads a bunch of independent local tribes, which are represented by mercenary units in Crescent Moon. Unlike other characters that can recruit units (Warlord and Caliph), the Nomad can recruit units where they don't have presence and no one has control. The cool thing is, as an action, other players can bribe the Nomad for mercenary units or hire them from the Nomad at an agreed upon price. The Nomad player scores the bulk of their victory points from spending money, so strategically they're motivated to place mercenary units in enticing locations so that other players want to bride them to convert them into their own mercenary units. In fact, this is the only way the Sultan and Murshid can get any units onto the board. The Nomad can also earn some cash-for-points by positioning themselves well for income phases. Either way, the more money they make, the more they can spend for victory points during the scoring phase.
I didn't get a chance to play a 4-player game, but the Nomad is not played in a 4-player game. Without the Nomad, the hire mercenaries action is slightly different. In that case you pay money to the supply to hire mercenary units, but you have to place them where you have presence and no other player has control, so you lost some of the neat flexibility you can get from the presence of a Nomad player. It sounds like it'll play fine that way, but I definitely like the dynamic of having a Nomad player that has their own motivations intertwined with the other four characters since it adds another layer to the negotiations in Crescent Moon.
After players complete four actions, the action phase ends and there's a scoring phase. During the scoring phase, players score points for any objectives they completed. You announce how many points you earn, then you take victory point tokens and put them facedown.
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In the player booklets, each character has primary and secondary objectives which score every year. Additionally, there's a year-one objective everyone has which is not only achievable, but it gives players something to aim for as they are learning the game. I found it to be super helpful for learning and teaching the game.
In my few games of Crescent Moon, the hidden victory points kept the gameplay very interesting. You usually had a good idea for the players that were in the lead, but you can't really recall everyone's exact total. This led to mind games, and players pointing fingers at each other claiming so-and-so has the most points, don't help them, or I definitely don't have more points than them, so please help me.
In the end, most of my games were surprisingly close. There was one game where the Murshid won with 36 points, and the Warlord and Caliph tied for second place with 35 points. The crazy thing is, the Nomad paid the Murshid one point in the last year to help win a combat, and had they not done that, there would've been a three-way tie for first, and the Warlord would've won instead since the tiebreaker is most money. It was wild!
Not knowing exactly where people are with victory points creates opportunities for people to bluff and talk their ways into shifting alliances. As the player with the most experience, I really enjoyed monitoring the social experiment that resulted from players not knowing exactly how many points anyone had. Plus, scoring up at the end of the game was always exciting.
So far I've thoroughly enjoyed all three of my plays of Crescent Moon and I'm excited to play it more. Mistakes were certainly made, and like any game with asymmetric factions, there's a learning curve. Naturally, there are going to be comparisons to Root since Crescent Moon has asymmetric factions, but it didn't really feel like Root to me. The character actions are more similar in Crescent Moon and there is a lot more happening on the negotiations front than Root. I also think it's also easier to teach and for new players to grasp than Root because there are many common actions.
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In my post-game discussions, there were also some comparisons to Pax Pamir and Dune, which makes total sense. I get Pax Pamir vibes from the way you're working with other players to manipulate the state of the board, while trying to be clever and sneaky as you focus on your own motivations. Sadly, I have yet to play Dune, but I am familiar with how it plays, and I think that might be the closest comparison.
Similar to games like Pax Pamir, I think Crescent Moon is going to shine when you play with experienced players. If people play their character poorly due to lack of experience, it may impact the whole game. Fortunately, this wasn't a big problem for any of the groups I played with, especially for the second and third games where I could teach it better and help people understand not only their own goals, but what to look out for with other players. Plus, when everyone knows their faction and how the others work, you can play more strategically on the offensive and defensive side.
Thematically, Crescent Moon felt mostly abstract to me, but I think they nailed it with the play style of the different characters. It allows players to get into their characters and create their own stories. I loved the dynamic of how the different characters relied upon each other, making and breaking deals, secretly trying to outscore each other.
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I played the standard 3-year game for all of my games, and they all ran just about 3 hours which felt fine, but I do want to try the longer game at some point as well. With only twelve actions you really have to carefully plan your moves and it creates an interesting decision space as you figure out what you want to do with each of your actions -- I really need to get cards, but should I wait so I have more money so I can buy more cards to be efficient?, or I really need to build in that space before someone takes it over, but if I don't take an influence action now while that other space is empty, I might have to fight someone for it later. Decisions, decisions.
I appreciate the variability that comes with different map setups too. It was interesting to make observations how different people played different characters on different maps and I'm looking forward to experimenting with custom map setups too.
One friend I played with commented that there wasn't enough variation when it came to the card powers/effects. Initially I agreed, but then I thought about it more and I think it works great the way they are. I don't think you need or want a huge variety of card types and effects in a game like this. It reduces randomness and adds a dose of predictability, which makes it more about bluffing and mind games when it comes to deciding how many cards you want to commit for combat and influence contests. I know they bought card XYZ, so they could potentially play it. In that case, maybe I should play card ABC. But if I play card ABC now, then I won't have it if someone else attacks me. I really love the emphasis on negotiations, bluffing, and mind games that stem from playing (or not playing) power cards in combat and influence contest.
It's too soon to say if I'll be loving Crescent Moon more or less after 10-20 more plays, but based on how much I enjoyed my first few beginner games with newbies, I suspect it only gets better from here. Plus, at the end of all of my games, multiple people wanted to play again and just rotate characters. That says something about the Crescent Moon experience.
Crescent Moon is not going a hit for everyone. It's the kind of game you want to play with the right group of people to create the right dynamic. If you have players that don't enjoy negotiating with other players, you probably won't get into this. However, if you enjoy asymmetric area control games, and/or games full of negotiation opportunities where you not only get to play the game, but also get to play the players, definitely check out Crescent Moon.
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