For many people, learning the rules of any unfamiliar board game can feel as alien as learning a brand new language. Yet few games make that experience quite as literal as City of Six Moons. Its rulebook arrives written in a mysterious series of symbols that players must translate before they can play the game itself – and may never know if they’ve got everything right.
Designer Amabel Holland originally designed the cryptic puzzle-game as a more conventional single-player experience about building up city-states in Mesopotamia. While that board game was designed back in 2018, Holland recalls she found “it was missing an indefinable something” at the time, putting the idea on the shelf and periodically revisiting it each year until inspiration struck to include the idea of translating an alien language in 2023 – a concept not often seen in the best board games.
