Moons were a distraction IMHO, here's how they worked:

- Each player received 2 moons (random draw from among 100) and placed them above their planets.
- When a player challenged a system, they could attack the Moon instead of a Planet.
- Attacking an empty moon you win automatically, put your ships there.
- Moons did NOT count towards victory, but they each had a unique power that affected the game while you had a ship on that moon.
- I can't remember but you may have been able to share moons with other players.
- Attacking an occupied moon was like a normal challenge (i.e. allies, play cards, etc). Killing the occupiers sends them to the warp, they lose that moon power, new owner gains said power.

Since attacking a moon takes up your whole challenge and did not give you a victory condition (i.e. a base going towards your win), for me it just prolonged the game. Some of the moon-powers were kind of cool, but a lot were silly.

Lucre never seemed to distract like this from the game, just enhance very slightly (gave ability to buy tokens from warp or cards for your hand), so we always played with Lucre. We rarely played with Moons...

And as for the FFG revamp, I haven't detailed them (maybe I should, take photos of each power+flare sidebyside EON vs. FFG (I don't have WEG nor Mayfair's versions)) but so far it seems like the powers are almost identical and the flares are very close if not identical. The one-flare-per-turn rule is new, but there's an "official" variant in the rule book to play the old-fashioned way (which we always do, love it ). So other than Technology and additional powers, FFG's version is very close to EON's, and I would hope Kevin's treatment Lucre would be similar...

-shnar

No real need to photograph every power & card together if you're willing to take the excellent database from The Warp ( http://redamedia.com/warp ) and line up two or more columns (one for each CE edition). All of the text is right there for the perusing.

But I'm with you on moons & lucre, Shnar. I played with moons once (Eon version) and it only seemed to make the game less interesting, and longer. Which meant fewer games that evening to play. Lucre was something we played with every time (again, Eon version), and I think it played as a more useful facet to the game than reinforcements ever did in later editions. I hated the Mayfair version of Lucre so much that I copied the Eon lucre powers and used that rule set after attempting the Mayfair version a few times. It was annoying trying to recall the number of lucre for each thing you could do, or when you could spend it for whatever effect you were wanting.

I don't know if it was cannon, but the way I played with the Eon Lucre rules was that right before the planning phase, each main player could buy cards, one at a time, until they were satisfied with what they had, or ran out of lucre. If it was a long game, that could have some enormous luck-titling effect one the end-game. Especially if you were a Lucre-gathering power with an awesome flare and one crappy attack card in your hand.

I certainly prefer moons over lucre, but would love to see what FFG would do with both.

We used moons in more specific ways than just the normal usage. Often we played that you had to occupy at least 1 external moon (sometimes 2) in order to win (and again sometimes with the rule that you could have NO moons occupied by other players in your system). That would occasionally call for only 4 colonies to win as opposed to 5.

The addition of "Blue Moons" added a much more strategic level to the game that I love. The Mayfair categorization of the moons was a masterful move on their part.

Okay.

So it looks like twenty new aliens (and twenty new flares), and something called a Reward Deck, and a sixth colour. I am one happy gamer!

My biggest hopes now are for new special destiny cards and rules for hazards!

I just learned about moons while reading this discussion (I started playing CE with the FFG version) and it seems like Techs are somewhat of their new version. I think that some of the useless moons could re-emerge as techs that require only 2 ships to research (that way they can be discarded fairly quickly while still functioning as a decent inconvenience), and some flat-out negative effect moons could be reworked as techs. Upon the completion of researching a negative tech, it could be given to another player and then stay in play. For example, a tech that only lets you put three ships maximum on the hyperspace gate could be given to Virus with great effect.

Giving a player a tech wouldn't really accomplish much, especially if they didn't have to put any ships on it ever. All you could do is prevent them from researching an additional tech, since they would already have one at the start of the game, and you wouldn't be able to give them a second one while they are still researching the first one.

While there are similarities between tech and moons, they are still different enough. The main point is that you can attack any other moon. And, the effects are immediate (except for secret moons) upon occupying them, even with only 1 ship. The Blue Moon variant also allows you to have more than one player occupy a moon (as they are designed to be co-occupied in their effects). I've found the moons to be especially useful when you have a weak hand and don't want to just give your opponent an easy victory (and his allies a lot of rewards) - just attack one of his vacant moons. You could pick up an effect that is useful and buy yourself time to get some better cards.

There are also a lot of great play variants that involve moons. We often played that you had to occupy at least one moon to win the game (often with the additional rule that you couldn't attack moons on your first encounter- so you had to win one before you could then go after a moon).

Jack, he's saying that you complete the tech and then essentially play it against another player by "giving it to them" to keep in front of themselves as a reminder of the limitation they are now under.

I think that's worse. Nothing like having a penalty placed on you that never goes a way to make for a negative gaming experience. If it had a built-in expiration, like the Witch's curse, that would actually make for a pretty cool tech variant. Still... I like my moons.