Moonbreaker, the latest game by Unknown Worlds, is a turn-based tabletop strategy game featuring great tactical depth and awesome miniature figurines. It is a great reimagining of multiplayer brain-teasers with a lot of original ideas,
Though the title only just entered early access, and there’s clearly a lot of balancing to be done, the initial roster of Captains—the key units you must keep alive to win the game—shows that there are already some winners and losers when it comes to deciding who should lead your roster.
Astra
Resource cheating is a very tricky thing to get right in the balance department, and all signs suggest that the developers’ first attempt at this was not exactly perfect. Astra’s ability to essentially gain an extra Cinder every turn with Improve Morale, then to use those gains to immediately attack with the newly deployed Crew members using Into the Breach makes her an unassailable powerhouse.
Though one would assume that these abilities were created with “ramp”-style, control rosters in mind, her skillset is actually all the more powerful in aggressive archetypes. Summoning multiple cheap units early and giving them initiative before the enemy can reliably respond means that you can quickly free-kill one or even two enemy Crew members and then directly apply pressure on the opponent’s Captain. Such builds seem to be the best-performing ones at the moment, and for a good reason.
Astra’s abilities also make Stowaway—already the most powerful Assist—even more important, and she can also fully leverage Cinder Infusion to its maximum potential on turn three. Also, since the cost reduction is permanent, Medical Recall coupled with Into the Breach can be a stupidly efficient way to redeploy one of your units.
Extilior
This big fella is your standard aggro option in the game. The goal is to get in the opponent’s face as soon as possible and deal multiples of three damage with Sword of Justice. But with so many movement manipulation tools available, this can prove to be quite difficult, and the significant lack of initiative compared to Astra makes this a fairly challenging strategy to execute right now. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of helplessness when you get Vortex Beam-ed over and over again just as you’re about to reach the enemy stack.
Zax Ja’kar
Zax is super cool. That’s about where we run out of positives about the guy. The abilities are just too cumbersome and expensive to make it worth the cost. Movement manipulation is already available to everyone with units like Crankbait (and a decent chunk of the Assists also overlap with Zax’s skillset), which means you’re stuck with a lower damage output than Extilior and a massive tempo deficit against any Astra you may go up against.
