As the sun rises over the deserts, rivers, and oases of the Caliphate, a delicate balance has been upset. As one of many rival powers in the region, you now have the opportunity to alter the course of history and seize power for yourself. The ambitious Sultan sits in a golden palace, presiding over great works of architecture. The secretive Murshid works to covertly undermine the central authorities through an expansive network of agents. While it will inevitably draw comparisons to Root, Crescent Moon manages to escape its shadow to stand alone as a fascinating and engrossing board game in its own right. From my fairly short time with it so far, it’s not quite an instant classic in the same way, but it’s well worth your time whether you’re looking for a Root alternative or not. You create a map of terrain hexes – 13 hexes for four players: 16 hexes for five. There are five different suggested layouts, recommended for your first few times playing. These set-ups also have a default starting positions on them for the factions. You and your opponents fight over this land, aiming to control areas of it at the end of each ‘year’.

It’s clear that you’re supposed to play the factions in a certain manner. They need to work together with one another (when the time is right). This is all well and good, but it sometimes feels like the game is too driven in this respect. Scripted, even. In other asymmetrical games, even though my faction had a direction, I still had freedom to play with variation. While it shares some similarities with Root, Crescent Moon is a different game - sometimes better, sometimes lesser and sometimes, well, just different. Like other semi-closed economy games driven by a card market such as Pax Pamir 2E, Crescent Moon does something nifty with money. The cards are really important and grant factions single-use and/or ongoing powers once acquired. To acquire those cards, you’ll have to pay the faction listed in the upper-left-hand corner of each card. Often, you’ll think twice about buying a card when it means paying your neighbor for something they might use against you later, or vice versa! I could create cool combos and thrive in among discoverabilities. You can’t do that as much, if at all, in Crescent Moon. I felt like I had to dance to the designer’s beat, especially with the Year One objectives. They’re the same objectives, every time. I get that this gives players an initial strategy to shoot for. But could some variability freshen this up? The Sultan's market is a prime example of how players must interact, with the Sultan able to haggle over prices with the rest of the table. | Image credit: Osprey Games

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The illustrations found in the game were mainly created by someone with Muslim origins and they reference a number of artworks from the Islamic world, which do lend the game an aura of authenticity and help the players immerse themselves in the culture portrayed in the game. The Game I appreciate the variability that comes with different map setups too. It was interesting to make observations how different people played different characters on different maps and I'm looking forward to experimenting with custom map setups too. Will you successfully navigate this web of rivalries and rise to prominence, or will you squabble with your lesser adversaries and fade into obscurity? But if you can split the difference and ensure you have exactly 5 players, Crescent Moon is a must buy.

Starting with exactly zero cash, the Nomad traffics in the sale of mercenary military units either from the map or from their reserves (units ready for action, just not on the board yet). Even better, once the Nomad had units on the map, other players can bribe them to place their own mercs in the hexes where the Nomad’s units used to reside. Had my regular Cthulhu Wars crew over today. We usually try to start with something else (we've been playing a fair amount of Tiny Epic Crimes lately) and when talking about a couple other games, I...Crescent Moon, by Osprey Games, is an asymmetrical area control game. Five different factions compete to dominate the lands of the Middle East in the 10th century. It’s inevitable that a game of this nature gets slung into the same sentence as Leder Games’ phenomenon, Root.