Rules are in ALIEN (all symbols) – City of Six Moons

I ordered this game December 17, 2024. It might take up to two months to receive it as each game is individually packaged.

It’s like someone discovered this alien board game and now we want to play it … but the rules aren’t in English … they are in ALIEN!

It would seem that most of the fun of the game will be just figuring out HOW to play the game. The game designer and publisher have stated that they will NOT answer any rules questions!

Here are some articles (reviews?) of the game(?)

  1. Designer Diary (background on the game written by the designer)
  2. Three Phases of Six Moons (written by someone who actually IS a translator of dead languages (ie Biblical))
  3. The Alien board game people are spending months translating (Polygon) first article I read about this game
  4. “People have spent 20 hours solving” City of Six Moons, the board game you must learn an alien language to play (Games Radar)
  5. BGG – Forum – Possible Errata (nope, it was correct – but the thread is interesting)

SIdenote: one of the “blue” cards looked a tad bit purple … the game designer has confirmed that this was a printing issue, and the card really should be the regular blue color!

A fairly short look at the “game” (or whatever you might call it):

Back of the box:

Promotional photos provided on the game designers / game publishers website:

From the official Facebook post:

The challenge with the rulebook for City of Six Moons – a solitaire game from an alien civilization whose rules the player must decipher on their own – is striking a balance between the inscrutable and solvable, while maintaining the conceit of a found object from an unknown culture and context.
I have done maybe eight versions of this first page, depicting how to set-up the game. For this page, I’m leaning more heavily on the familiar – on the visual language of a modern board game rulebook and set-up diagram – so the player has something to hang onto while they get started.
The game’s lexicon uses a number of symbols indicating actions, relationships, or mathematical operations. I used them a lot in earlier versions of this page but mostly avoided those here so as not to overload the player with information, giving them only one of these symbols to parse.
The other puzzle-focus of the first page is the number system. Combine the page with the box cover and the components included in the game, you will be able to read every number. This in turn will help you later in the book to understand mathematical operations as they are presented.
The first page is deliberately easy to start the player on solid footing and give them some confidence. “Ah, I get it, *that’s* why that box starts with two thingies in it! I got this, I can do it!” I want that feeling to carry them through as things lean more alien and inscrutable.
To parse the rest of the book, you’ll need to take the book as a whole – the context you need to understand page two might be found on pages four and six, for example, but you’ll only understand that part of page six once you’ve understood page three. It’s one puzzle, not a series of puzzles.
But it’s important to get their feet wet, and give them a chance to buy-in on the whole thing. So “solving” this first page is pretty trivial and self-contained.
INCLUDED THIS “picture”
And on the day before New Years Eve (December 20, 2024) this game company included this blurb in their newsletter:

City of Six Moons sold strongly right out of the gate, almost immediately becoming our fastest-selling title. This also made it our bestselling game of 2024, as well as the top seller of this year’s Hollandays Sale. And now, it’s become our bestselling game, ever, in the history of our weird little company, having just edged past our longstanding flagship title Table Battles.

That’s kinda nuts! In six months, this game has sold more copies than Table Battles has sold in eight years. That in and of itself seemed like impossible pie-in-the-sky stuff, but for it to be done by a game as experimental and high concept as Six Moons – a game where you must translate the rulebook yourself? That’s astonishing.

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