Charity Challenge - Week 2 Night 3
Welcome to our 8th night of the O’Sullivan Family Charity Challenge where we’re raising funds and awareness of a cause that’s near and dear to our hearts: mental health!
If you’d like to donate in support of our campaign which is raising money for CAMH, you can do so here.
Thank you for following along, and for everyone who has donated so far!
The Choice
I’ve gotta be honest – Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of last night’s Cottage Garden is one of my favourite game designers and is very much responsible for some of my earliest loves in board gaming. So when Rachel inevitably beats me at one of his games in the Charity Challenge it hurts…
So I think I’ve got no choice tonight to call one of his games. Tonight we’ll be playing one of his games from last year, Nova Luna.
The Game
Nova Luna is a tile placement race game by Uwe Rosenberg that sort of plays with some of the mechanisms of one of his other games, (Charity Challenge favourite…) Patchwork. Just like in patchwork there’s sort of two currencies – in this case tasks completed and time. If you take a really good piece, it’s going to eat up more time and let your opponent do more. It’s an interesting balancing act. In case I haven’t done it justice, here’s the official description:
The new moon is a symbol for a new beginning, the perfect time to start something new and to plan your future — and that is what Nova Luna (lat. for new moon) is all about. In each round of this abstract tile-laying game, you have to plan your future anew, developing a new strategy to cope with what the moon wheel has to offer you.
On each turn, you have to decide which new tile from the moon wheel to place in front of you. Every new tile brings a new task you have to fulfill. In order to do so, you need to place tiles of the correct color adjacent to the task you want to complete, but these of course again bring you new tasks. Each time a task is solved, you may place one of your markers on it. So decide wisely and be the first one to place all your markers.
boardgamegeek.com
If you’d like to learn more about Nova Luna, Zee Garcia has a great review and explanation you can watch here.
The Result
Probably the thing that most makes Nova Luna a compelling game is how by design unless you really manage to chain together an IQ 200 game, the games are close and full of tension. And so it was tonight, Rachel and basically were neck and neck all the way throughout. I was managing to take more time efficient actions while Rachel was managing to get some points on the board clearing away her objectives with her more limited moves.
In the end Rachel managed to clear all of her objectives while I had 2 left, meaning that for the second night in a row Rachel has thrown an Uwe game back at me! That takes us to 2-1 for Rachel on the week and I really have to do something to stop the slide!