First Impressions of Dark Moon

I’m a big fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a classic horror movie of arctic researchers trapped with a shape shifting alien or two running amok. So I’d been excited for a long while to try out Dark Moon, perhaps otherwise known as The Thing in Space, a wonderfully atmospheric hidden traitor game in which you desperately try to root out the infected from amongst the crew of your mining outpost at the far edge of existence.

My first game of this was a bit of a white wash; the opening round saw one player demanding a blood sample from another. That player refused; it was clear he must be infected and the group quarantined him immediately. From then on it was a relatively simple matter for us to complete the tasks and survive. Not a walk in the park, there was still the second infected to identify, but much of the game’s challenge had been taken away… and I still loved it!

The central mechanic used to complete tasks involves rolling dice, dice with 4 negative sides and 2 positive, in secret. If you decide to roll you need to contribute, even if every dice came up negative! This means that if even good people fall under suspicion and the infected can “fluff” their roles at just the key time. Plus, if the commander never manages to get a good roll with his super awesome blue die he is going to look really suspicious!

Committing your dice also reduces your pool for future rolls, until you get to “reload” at the start of your turn, meaning the risk of a bad roll steadily increases. You’ll also want to take black dice, because they can give you the coveted +4 rather than the red die’s +3, but you’ll need those red dice to quarantine a suspicious team member, or prevent a quarantined player from escaping, as happened to us!

Oh it’s just so wonderfully tense and everyone is a threat. There are brilliant task cards that ask a player to give you one of their dice permanently, requiring a big slice of trust. They are a very effective way of the infected hurting the survivors, but they are also an easy task to complete, useful because failing tasks can damage and ultimately destroy the station. The game is not without its flaws, being caught so early by an unlucky card really stole some of the fun from that player’s game, but such is the way with many hidden role games. Definitely one to play more!