The Hungry Gamer Previews Lunar Rush Innovations

0:00 Ooh, that looks tasty. Welcome folks. The Hunger Gamer is back with another crowdfunding preview. And today we're talking about Lunar Rush Innovations designed by Steven Skippy Brown and published by Dead Alive Games. And what this is is this is the first expansion to Lunar Rush. And it is a major expansion with a whole bunch of stuff going on. Now, I've already made the official how to play video for Lunar Rush, so I'm not going to rehash how the game itself works. I'm just going to talk about all the bits and bobs that come with the expansion. Now, the next thing I'll say before I jump in is what you're seeing here is representative of a deluxe version. The retail version will be well, less deluxe. And also, I do need to point out that the designer is my brother and I am working with Dead Alive Games, helping them obtain media coverage for the game.

1:00 However, I have not been paid anything for this video specifically. I'm just have I am just being paid a little bit to literally help them find different creators that are interested in this style of game and might be interested in covering it. But take all of that into consideration as you consider what I have to say about this game. And there we go. Now, if you're not familiar, what Lunar Rush is, is it is a simultaneous play Euro game in which you are sending materials from the Earth up to the moon and using that to build up your moon base. And then you are running your moon base to get stuff off of the moon because we found new elements on the moon. And of course, we're going to rip that stuff out of the moon, fly it back down to Earth, and sell it to rich people who don't really need it. But that's kind of what you're doing. and it plays in about an hour and 20 minutes or so over the course of seven rounds. Now, if you are not interested in how this expansion works and just want to jump to my final thoughts, then you want to go to the timestamp on the screen right now. For those of us still here, let's talk about what we have here. The first thing is, as you can see, we add a fifth player to the game, which is also what these little boards are over here. It adds another medium route that you can use in the game as you're flying up and down from the moon. Now, I'm going to pull these off to the side, and we're not going to talk about those anymore.

2:16 Now, the next thing I'm going to talk about is not this. I'm going to talk about the smaller modules that are added to the game. The first one is the event deck. And what this module does is it adds a series of events that take place throughout the game. And it doesn't happen at the very beginning of the game, but as you go through on different rounds, you'll start getting these events. And you might have a bad event like depleted ore mines, which means during the moon phase in this case, you discard one ore for every two that you produce on a moon base. Bad, bad, bad. Or you might have, Ha, see what I did there? Or a neutral event like this one right here, where you can't place workers on any ships, whether up or down. Or, aha, did it again. You might have something good like this new ore discovery. And as you go through the game, these will start coming up. And the way that I played this recently, and this may not be the final version, is you actually get to see one round before it takes effect, what's going to happen.

3:12 So, I might know a round before that ore is going to be really, really good, so maybe I want to prep for that. Or I might know that I can't send any workers up next turn, so maybe I want to put a bunch of munch on ships now, etc., etc. And again, just to be clear, that might be something that changes to where it's so wholly on the turn that it flips up. It happens immediately. Next, we have a new scoring condition. These are in-game awards. There's a bunch of them. I just have three of them out here. And very simple. You're going to get bonuses for various things. So, in this case, having the most energy left, you'll get 10 points. Having the most gold modules built, get 20 points. And having the least cube stuff left over, you get 10 points. So, you're being awarded for being more efficient. And as I said, there's a whole bunch of those. And then the last of the mini modules are the milestones. And these are scoring conditions that are out in the game from the beginning. And as soon as someone accomplishes one, then they get those points. And so it's just kind of gives you a little push to kind of race towards certain objectives as you're playing through the game. And there's a whole bunch of these as well. But let's talk about the big expansion, and that is the five asymmetric factions. And each of the factions comes with their own player board because I'll just slide one over here. As you can see, the core part of the game is now completely different. Every different faction will play well differently. And I'll run through kind of what they are very quickly. First, you have the yellow faction. And the yellow faction plays just like the core game except you have

4:44 these spaces for specialists. And you can always send a specialist up from Earth whenever you want. And as you can imagine, there's different kinds of specialists. So, this farming specialist can go there. This mining specialist can go there. And there's all sorts of different types of specialists that you can get. But here's the catch. Not only do you have to feed them if they're on your base, but since they are consultants, every single turn they are not on Earth, you have to pay three credits. So if you stick them on a slow boat going up, you're going to wind up out at least nine credits before they even get to do anything. So it kind of makes you prioritize the faster routes sometimes. And it also means that you're often sending workers back down and taking up spaces on your ships going down. Next, we have the cyborgs. And very simply, they are cyborgs. And they are bigger than the usual workers. As you can see, it's just a little bit bigger. We'll talk about this purple guy in a moment. But you can only ever have a maximum of six of them on your moon base. So, there are fewer of them. So, you have to be a little more clever with what you're doing. But as you can see, each of their spots that they can go to is very powerful. The other thing that happens is at the end of each day, you're going to have to spend one life support and one energy to feed them because they got to get those mechanical bits moving just like they got to get those me bits moving. Next, we have the red faction. And the red

6:15 faction is going to play pretty much exactly the same as normal faction. You'll notice there's this kind of research symbol here and it takes two workers over here because these are these are scientists. They're not they're not the strongest guys out there. So, it's a little bit harder for them to do things. But, this spot right here is going to allow you to get these research tokens. And you'll be using these research tokens to unlock these special gamebreaking abilities. And when I tell you they're game-breaking, they are game-breaking. And so, you'll be using your workers to research these things. And as you're researching them, you'll be well powering yourself up with, as I said, game-breaking abilities. Like, let's look at this wormhole right here. A lot of text on here, but each turn after choosing routes, instead of loading items onto one of your launch ships during the appropriate phase, you may immediately teleport all items on that ship to its destination. So, in other words, you can get the slow boat and then just boom, get it like it's the fast boat. Unbelievable. Or we can look at this wondrous construction here, which is if you're playing with the moon wonders module, you can build those things for free. That's a ton of points.

7:29 So, as I said, very, very game-breaking, but you got to get them. And, well, your workers on their own kind of suck. Next, we have the green faction, the robot faction. You'll notice up here there's no life support. In fact, it's just a space for you to have your charged robots and your uncharged robots. And the catch with the robots is you get a ton of them. Now, I just tossed out a few, but you can have up to 20 of them. And you don't have to feed them, obviously, because they're robots. And in fact, you don't even have to power them up. You can leave them unpowered for the next round. They don't die. They're still going to be there hanging out. You just can't use them. But you're going to have a total of 30 different robots that you can use out there. But obviously, you really have to make sure that you're getting a lot of energy as you're doing it. Also, I'll point out that in general, the robots aren't great at doing things. I think I look at it as kind of being well, it's just kind of a robo arm that's moving and grabbing a thing. That's kind of all it can do. But that's how the green robot faction works. And then we come to the gambler faction. This is the new faction. You are can now play purple.

8:39 Woo. Now they just have normal workers. However, it's a high-risk, highreward type faction because what's going to happen is every single time you play a worker, you're going to roll two dice, which makes this the only faction that is not purely determinative. It adds some chaos to it. So you're going to roll that. Oh, look. I rolled an 11, which means right here, I'm going to get three life support. And then over here, I'm going to roll again. And here, oh, I got five. So, I actually get nothing. Now, there is some mitigation where you can use energy to adjust the dice a little bit. And as you upgrade them, you'll see you actually start losing the chance that goes with it. But you'll see it doesn't actually get any better. So, if I upgrade my solar array, I'm always going to get three, which is like I rolled the max on the dice. But again, you could have already gotten that anyway just by rolling the dice. And so, that's how the gamblers faction works. And that's the core of the changes to the game. So, with that said, what do I like about this expansion? So, jumping kind of right into this and as an expansion and knowing that I like the core game. This is a little bit different than I normally do with, you know, my likes, my quibbles, and all that. I'm just kind of going to talk about each of the different things added to the game separately. So, we're kind of just bounce through all the different modules and everything else. So, to start out, fifth player, great. I've never played this game at five players. However, I

10:11 played at one, two, three, and four players, and adding players does not really add a lot of time to the game because so much simultaneous. So, cool. Great. If you were clamoring to play it to five, now you can. Awesome. Talking about the little modules, I'll start with my favorite of them, that is the events. I I like the way that works. I like that it just kind of mixes things up just a little bit. the same type of thing that the wonders do. How suddenly partway through the game, you kind of have to shift your focus, so you can't just juice the same engine over and over and over again. I like how it mixes things up a little bit, particularly with the way that we were playing where you had one round notice of what was coming. Again, I don't know if that's going to be the final version of it, but that's how we played and I really found that to be fun and interesting and something to plan for, but not a high overhead as far as my brain goes. really really like that. Moving into my next favorite, that is the milestones. Those are fun because a lot of times what I find can happen when I play this is the first couple rounds you're just kind of building up, building up, and then things start happening. But with these milestones out there, suddenly you see things like, "Oh, I should try to chase that." So, in the game original Don and I played, one of the milestones was have three ships arrive on the exact same turn. Meaning you had to get the slow boat the first turn, then the medium boat the next turn, and then the fast boat the next turn. And I chased that thing the whole game. And I wound up winning by like six points. So I guess it worked out. But it

11:42 was really fun to chase those. The first person do this thing, you get a bonus. And that I really, really like those a lot. I might like those more than the events. It's close. I'm going to still lean to the events as my favorite. And then we have the awards at the end. And I think they're fine. They are something that it's nice to kind of have them in there just kind of another little layer of scoring, but if I'm kind of ranking all these mini modules, it's the last one on the list for me because there's so much scoring going on in the game anyway, I don't know that it's necessary. But that said, it was kind of cool at the end of the game to get an extra bonus because I had had the most gold modules and another extra bonus because I just barely had more food left over. And so it was something that I paid attention to at the end of the game. So it was just kind of another little something to think about and it was it was pretty cool. And then of course talking about the real part of this expansion that's asymmetric factions and that's that's where this game shines. That's where well that's what this is about. Like the other modules are cool. I don't need them. these expansion factions. That is what I'm talking about. Because part of the fun, well, the main fun I think of Lunar Rush is building up your base. And you become asymmetric as you go because you start focusing on different things. But with this expansion, these factions play crazy different. And I am here for it. I think it's just so cool. For me, the gamblers are my favorite because I like a little chaos in my game. And as you kind of go through, they actually become a little less chaotic. But very cool,

13:14 very fun that you have them there. You're chucking the dice. I like that a lot. I had just until recently never seen anybody win with the specialist because I they're so hard because you're burning your money, paying for these consultants. But I've really focused the last game when I won just by a few points of really focusing on getting them up, using them, and getting them back. And if I wasn't finding a huge use for them, send them back right away. get them on a fast boat. And I really like that it changed how I played the game. I have played the red faction, the scientists before and like they're really cool cuz you're playing through and you feel like you're just struggling to do anything until suddenly the world is your oyster because you have all these different things that suddenly you're doing. You have just broken the game because of your science. Cyborgs are really cool because you have to kind of pay attention to what you're doing because you just don't have a lot of workers to place. You just don't. And they're hard to get up. They're expensive to maintain. So very, very interesting. And I'm not going to kind of go through all of them, but the way that they're all so different to me is really, really cool.

14:25 If I have to rank them, and I'm going to rank them because I can. It's my channel, and no one can stop me. I'm going to rank them like this. My favorite, you got the purple gamblers. Really, really like the way that those guys go with the chucking of the dice. Followed by the red science faction. I love game-breaking stuff. And man, is it gamebreaking. Next, after that, I'm going to go with cyborgs. Super powerful guys up there. Love the way that works. Next, after that, I'm going to go ahead and give that to Ooh, this is tough. I'm going to go with the robot faction. Something about having 20 workers up there that you don't have to feed is really, really cool. Then I'm going to give it to the consultants, the specialist faction. Oh, but I did really well with them. But nope, I'm still going to put them there. The thing that I think is interesting about it is that I've ranked them is original Don would rank them differently. The designer would rank them differently because it's a matter of what you like to do. And I like that randomness that you have at the beginning with the gamblers. So anyhow, I think that if you are someone that enjoyed Lunar Rush to begin with, then this is probably a must back. It just expands things in a way that all of them are good. Even as I said, my least favorite is the awards at the end, but even that is interesting. It made you think about something and so I do like that. So everything around there, I think, is just better and better. I think obviously if you're someone that likes asymmetric things and think about

15:57 Merchants Cove, then yeah, you absolutely want to get this with this expansion. Now, with that said, if you did not like Lunar Rush, is this going to make you suddenly like Lunar Rush? Probably not. Either you like that simultaneous play and you're really trying to get that balance between time and stuff. If you didn't like that and you didn't like that bidding that you have to do to kind of make that work and building your movements, well, this isn't going to make you like it. But if you did enjoy it, if even if you're like, "Yeah, that was fun." Then this is probably going to make you say, "Man, this is really cooking." So there you have it, folks. That is Lunar Rush Innovations. As always, if I made any mistakes in my description at the beginning, well, you probably don't know because not many people have this right now, but do let me know in the comments the time stamp so I can get that in the clicking on subtitles. If you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching.

16:49 Have a wonderful, wonderful day.