A short "making of " of this tremendous expansion (not yet finished)
My first idea was to create a more difficult expansion than the others previously published by Warfrog and John Bohrer. As i am fond of Sci Fi, i immediatly think at a Moon expansion.
Yes, there is no train on the Moon at this time, and it would be a real challenge to make my expansion a little bit realistic. It was also the first time than an expansion would take place on an entire sphere instead of in one single country with cities.
As my theme was chosen, i have had to feature innovative mecanisms to simulate the presence of human being on this satelite. It was natural to change the cities colors in a more dynamic way than printing black cities on the map. So Black city will occur with "a night turn" and real color will occur with " a day turn" The principal idea of this map was created.
In the same time, i wrote the background of this map and realised that it could be nice to force player to begin their network from a central hex. In the basic game, a bad choice for the starting place penalize novice players, but if all the players have to begin their network from the same hex, then they will have the same advantage or disadvantage.
As it is The moon, a standard hex cost $3, as it is the moon again, there will be less cities, and less goods. I tried to design my first map with 8 cities and a center hex that is a starting base. This one was bigger because you were allowed to build 3 tracks and 4 with the engineer at terrific costs of $12.
We tested this map a lot, but it doesn't work very well, probably too difficult to connect interesting cities.So i stopped these moon ideas for 2 months.
2 Months later, i said to my wife in an age of steam discussion that the moon is a sphere.", Howwww, you are a genius to realize that the moon is a sphere!!, she said" So we should allow connection between edges.
I remembered when i was young and played Risk against my cousins during summer holidays "Kamchakta attacks Alaska" was in my mind and i imagine the first "plan sphere". Writting numbers around the map was the easiest way and the clearest way to make the connection real, hex number 1 links hex number 1 and so on...
At this time, as we could build 3 hexes and 4 with the engineer, it was too easy to connect cities all around the moon East to West, north to South. I tried to change color cities, number of goods, the number of cities, but nothing convinced me. I thought to change the number of hexes that a player could build, but i thought it was too drastic.
Few months later, i played with my friend Ludovic Gimet with this protoype and he gave me advices : reduce the size of the map, and try to reduce to 2 hexes the number of hexes a player can build.
I redesigned another map, smaller, and as it was smaller , i drew only 6 cities with only purple on the right and only yellow on the left. With the "night mecanism", they won't be purple city on the map during the night on the right and they won't be yellow city during the night on the left. The urbanization action will not be changed in order to get a chance to have a yellow city on the map and a purple one too... But it it would be ridiculous to let player to urbanize in black...
We tested this map again a lot, and this time, it works very well. In our games, we had to use very often links of other people because of the small map, because of the beginning of the game and because of the lack of goods , because of the network that wraps around. So it would be nice to contre balance the power of the locomotive action by a more thematic ones. Low gravitation was immediatly a good idea so cubes could fly near network...
Because of the lack of goods and land base, i added more cubes on the landing base to simulate goods to colonize the moon. To finalize my map and to reduce the power of the first build player, i allowed the next player to build from the central hex or from a city linked by the first player. Same rule with the next player player. So the last player would have more opportunities than the first one.
The last rules i modified was the production rules. Only cities that have a link to the central hex can get cubes on this phase. So cubes would not "arrive" too fast in cities. I added in the same time montain , just for fun !!
We tested and tested and tested, and i was very proud of this expansion that was very different of the others that changed only one or two rules.
This expansion was released for the ESSEN05 fair and package with the Reunion island of Ludovic Gimet.
This set was sold in a numeroted box (only 180 boxes were produced)
The year after, Ludibay contacted me to make this map more available. It was natural to reprint The Moon with another prototype of myself Mars. (only 100 sets are available)