Moon Rings (Review)

[Music] Hey folks, welcome back to the dungeon dive. Daniel here. I hope you're doing well and if you're not, I hope you are soon. Okay, on today's episode, just a quick review for you all and that is a game called Moon Rings. Now, I bought this printed version from tabletopbookshelf.com, and that's a site that I've been enjoying a lot lately.

I've been ordering a lot of stuff. Uh, they do really good targeting advertising on Facebook, and I always seem to stumble across things that I enjoy from Tabletop Bookshelf. It's available at other places as well, and you can get a PDF on it.io for about $5. And I believe this printed version is $20 and it's pretty nice.

So this is from junk food games and as you can see humanmade stamp there so no AI was used. So this says that moon rings is a solo journaling game. You are a witch who wishes to end the reign of the cursed blood moon. Venture into the labyrinth, find the moon rings and cast the ritual to change the moon.

The labyrinth is deadly and the blood moon is watching. So you'll need your strength of will, magic, and good fortune to make it to the end. This game is based on the Carta and Aspire tabletop RPG systems. Grab a deck of cards, some 12-sided dice, and stuff to journal with, and you'll be ready to play.

So, I while this says this is a journaling game, I don't think the journaling is quite as important as it is in some games. I haven't been doing too much journaling. But if you like keeping track of the things that your character has done, then you might find some benefit in grabbing a notebook and writing some of your responses to some of the prompts, some of the encounters.

So, in this game, you play as a witch and you will have a character sheet here. I got the PDF when I bought the physical copy from tabletop bookshelf and so I just printed the character sheet. Here you will keep track of your name, the current moon cycle, some descriptors if you want to write about your character, and then it'll have a place here for you to write some some lines of a ritual that you will recite.

When you find the ritual room, you have a few stats to keep track of, such as blood. Blood is basically your HP. When your blood goes down to zero, you have died. You have perished in the dangerous labyrinth, and that is the end of the game. And then you have a couple of currencies here. You have umbil shift and mana touch and those can be used to help offset some of the luck in the game, some of the die rolls.

So for an umbil shift, you can takeick off a box and you can use that to roll your dice or you can takeick off a box on your mana touch and you can add one or subtract one from your d12 result. As you're play as you play through the game, you will be able to get more uses of each one of these currencies.

And that's kind of the main mechanism. This is a simple game. I think this is a good game, maybe a travel game to kind of throw in your bag when you are traveling. But yeah, you are playing as a witch and you will be working through a labyrinth. And the labyrinth is made up of a deck of cards. So you will take a deck of cards.

You will remove your jokers. You will also need three 12sided dice. And you will also need a pawn or something to keep track of where your character is. So, when you're setting up the game, you will take out your ace of hearts and your ace of spades. Your ace of spades is your starter card. That's where you will start a game.

The ace of hearts is the ritual room. This is the room that you are trying to find after you have acquired five uh moon rings. So, you're going through the labyrinth trying to find moon rings and then you want to find the ritual. You want to recite the ritual and that will give you a successful conclusion to the game.

Then you take your cards and you will draw 23. So let's give these a quick shuffle here. So 23 cards. One, two, 23. You will keep the rest of your cards aside because there there will be opportunities to draw those cards. The face cards in the deck are the most uh most efficient way to find the moon rings, but there are also other ways such as when you roll dice, you might find a result that allows you to find a moon ring in a nonface card room.

You will take your ace of hearts and you will shuffle that into your deck and then you will create the labyrinth. will create the dungeon that you are going through by laying the cards out in a grid that is 6x4. So, I'll go ahead and do that now. Okay, so here we have our labyrinth set up and that's a 6x4 grid.

Here we have our starting room, the ace of spades with my character pond there. I am ready to go into the dungeon and try to find the moon rings. But, uh, let's see. Let's give my character a name here. I will be fella fell shashiron. Okay, fellafoseron. Uh we could write a description of our character.

We start with 20 blood and we start with one power of umbal shift and one power of mana touch. So that's basically a character. This is a very very simple game and so if you're just looking for something very light on rules, this might be something that you want to look into. So, the way the game is played is you will move to a card.

You will flip that card over and then you will turn to that card in the book and that card will have some kind of encounter. It will have a prompt. You will usually roll a d12 trying to roll a certain number or below or above and then you will pay the consequences of that role. You will either either succeed or you will fail.

And sometimes you will lose health. Sometimes you can gain health. You can uh gain other powers. you can gain other uses of your two magical powers and sometimes you will be told to draw different cards from the deck to look for certain cards. So the way the different encounters work is cards numbers two through six you will roll under a number.

Cards 7 to 10 you will roll over the number and a face card of a jack, queen or a king, you must roll over a 10. So that is very hard. pretty challenging to find those uh moon rings. And so you do want to save up your umbil shift and your mana touch in order to uh mitigate some of that bad luck that might happen when you reach those special rooms.

Uh here we have the magical abilities and how they work. And finally, you will have an opportunity to re-roll your d12. So when you first go into a room, you will roll a d12. you will consult the card that you are on. If you uh are able to overcome the challenge, you can just move on. However, there is an opportunity to go ahead and press your luck and then if you do that again and you do uh meet the requirements, then you can go on.

If you don't, you have to take some additional damage and you can do that up to three times. However, there is another reason that you might want to press your luck to take some additional damage because if you ever roll on one of your dice the same exact number as the card, then you get an opportunity to also get a moon ring.

So, there are a few different ways to get moon rings beyond just finding those face cards. If you roll in all three of your D12s, then you have to roll on this chart and it's really bad. You can lose two blood. You can discard the top five cards from the remaining deck, thus lessening the chance of finding one of the moon rings.

You have to use up all of your magic abilities, or you can lose a finger. Decide which finger is lost randomly and mark it on your character sheet. Any ring worn on this finger is lost. You may still complete the ritual if you wear two rings on one finger. So, there is some really bad stuff that might happen that will cause you to lose a ring that you have already found.

As you find the moon rings, each moon ring will have a few lines of a ritual. And then you can choose which of those lines to add to your ritual text, creating a kind of unique poem to be read at that ritual site. And I think that's pretty cool. It does add a little bit of personality to that mechanism.

And the game ends when you have found all five moon rings and you have found the ritual site, the ace of hearts or you have lost all of your blood or you have explored all of the cards and you were unable to acquire five different moon rings. So that triggers the end of the game. And here we have our encounter card catalog.

And the rest of the book is just various random encounters that you will have with those cards. So we start on the ace of spades. And so let's read about the entrance here. So, this is Ace of Spades, the entrance. After a long search, you spot a simple stone door hidden within a cops of trees. The entrance to the great labyrinth stands before you.

As you approach, a small moon carved into the door begins to glow red. The door opens. You steal your resolve and step through the threshold. A stairwell leads you underground into the depths of the labyrinth. You hear the door close behind you with an air of finality as you make your way deeper. There are no encounters in this location.

You may not willingly return to this location. Okay, so let's take our our first exploration step. I'll play a couple of turns. I don't want to give away too much because part of the joy of this game is discovering those encounters on your own. But we'll go ahead and move into this first room here. And that is a five of spades.

Okay. So, let's see what we find when we go into the five of spades here. I do really like this spiralbound book. I love spiralbound books, especially with RPGs. It just makes them so easy to fold and hold and to to keep on a smaller table. Leaving the labyrinth or living labyrinth, I should say. Okay.

You are awoken to trimmers in the ground underneath you and the sounds of grinding stones. As you look around, the earth stills and it is quiet once more. You see dirt and dust fall from the walls and the ceiling. This does not seem to be the same area you set up camp in the night before. You cannot find the trail from whence you came from which you came.

You attempt to fight back feelings of deep despair. Okay. Roll under a five to succeed. Okay. So, we have to roll a 1 2 3 or four. So, let's take our first d12 and roll it. And we roll a three. Hey, we do it. All right. So, on success, you may peek at one card on the grid adjacent to you without having to move to it.

Okay. So, maybe we can find our first our first uh face card here. Uh let's peek at this one here. Ah, a queen of hearts. Excellent. So, we know that that's a queen of hearts. We know that a moon ring is there. Uh we don't have a lot of magic. We haven't built up a lot of mana or umbrell, but we do have uh one of each of those.

So, we could go there and try to get that moon ring. Uh let's explore south. Let's maybe see if we can uh boost up our magic a little bit. Okay, we find a two of spades. So, I will move there. And now, let's read the two of spades entry here. Doorways. You set foot in a massive circular room lined with many doors.

The door you entered through closes behind you. A shadowed figure stands among a pile of cryptic papers and scrolled markings on the floor. They whisper, "There are many ways forward in this place and many that will lead you to great danger. You may open but one door. You spin slowly and survey your options.

The figure is gone by the time you turn back around." Okay, roll under a two to succeed. Okay, so this is nearly impossible. We have a 1 in 12 chance. We need to roll a one. And we roll an 11. No. Okay. So, we don't have anything bad. Nothing bad happens. We do lose one blood because we did fail, but I don't want to press my luck.

I don't want to go further. There was no chance to get a moon ring. Uh, what were the rewards? Let's see the rewards. If we did roll a one on a success, peek at any one card on the grid. You may move your character token to this card at the start of your next turn. Okay, so very similar to the five of spades there, but let's go ahead and when you backtrack, you don't have to have that encounter again, but I think something bad happens or you do have to spend some blood.

So blood is kind of like your not just your HP, but also kind of a timer as you work your way through the dungeon. So when you backtrack, you do lose two blood. So my blood would be down to 18. Additionally, I did fail that last check, so I do lose an additional point of blood. So, I am now down to 17 blood.

Okay, let's take our next turn. And this will be the final turn I show you just so I don't spoil too much in this game for you. We will move on to that moon ring. Okay, so we find the Queen of Hearts. Let's go to the Queen of Hearts and see what this says. So, each moon ring will be associated with a line of the ritual.

And then you can choose which line to add to your ritual text. And so each time you play through the game, you will generate some new text for the ritual. And again, I do really like that. So this is called the new ring. A p of celebration burns in the middle of a vast room. Specters dance and sing around the fire.

They welcome you and invite you to join in the festivities. A ring can see can be seen suspended in the flames. You think of how to retrieve it. The heat from the py is suffocating even from across the room. Okay, so now we have to roll over a 10 to succeed. So we have a pretty small chance to acquire this ring.

Let's roll our first d12 here and an 11. Holy crap. Yes, we did it. All right, so uh on success, you bear the new ring. It is a simple metal ring that appears to be just forged. It emanates heat and glows a searing yellow. Untouch though, you are not burned. You feel an inviting warmth on your hand.

Okay, so now we can choose one of these lines of the ritual. We have a great new moon begins. All crimson washed away. We await your absolution. Shed this hate, O scion of joy, and celebrate with us. I like all crimson washed away. So I'm going to add that to this line of the moon here. So all crimson washed away.

And now I have to choose a finger to wear the new ring. Uh I will put that on my pointer finger here. So I will just write N R for new ring. So I have one ring there. Actually yeah that does have to match the finger matches the line that you have chosen. So that is on my pointer finger there. And so, yeah, that's kind of the game there.

It's very simple. I will say that I think the prompts are well written. They are creepy and I have enjoyed reading the ones that I have discovered. And uh if you keep track of your progress with a little journal, by the end of the game, you do have a pretty cool little story about your witch's adventures in this weird labyrinth.

Now, a game that this does remind me of in its simplicity and in its execution is a much larger, more elaborate game that we took a look at earlier this year. And that is Cyber Flesh. And Cyber Flesh is a game where you are basically just moving from one tile to the next and you are trying to uh work your way through a little labyrinth, but it has very elaborate production with some amazing art and components and this really nice box.

This this the component quality and the art and the cards and everything go a long way in making Cyber Flesh such a super cool game. And I would actually love to see an elaborate version of moon rings created in the same style of cyber flesh. I I can just imagine a really nice kind of matte black box, black and red uh moon rings with some great creepy art and maybe some some cool little things like a little pentagram or something or some incense or just something a really nice elaborate production to set the mood of this game.

I think would be really cool and I would definitely be down to uh to support something like that if uh if a junk food games ever decided to uh to go down that route. But as a cool little very simple game that's easy to travel with, it's easy to play and the spiralbound physical edition was $20 and the PDF on H.IO is $5.

you know, you might want to add this to your your binder of simple travel games because I think it can give you just kind of a nice relaxing time, especially if you like that kind of folk horror element to the game. You know, a witch traversing this weird uh labyrinth and just finding all kinds of weird creatures and denisins and different types of encounters that they might have to overcome.

It's kind of cool. It's not amazing. I'm not going to say that this game like blew my mind or anything, but I'm happy I got it. I'm happy I was able to support uh the creators, and I like these little kinds of games. I think they are they're easy to pick up and just have fun for, you know, for about an hour with not a lot of mental commitment and not a lot of financial commitment.

So, all right. I hope you enjoyed taking a look at Moon Rings. We will talk to you later. Bye-bye.