"People have spent 20 hours solving" City of Six Moons, the board game you must learn an alien language to play

Tabletop Gaming"People have spent 20 hours solving" City of Six Moons, the board game you must learn an alien language to playWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. Tabletop Gaming"People have spent 20 hours solving" City of Six Moons, the board game you must learn an alien language to playWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Mary Holland) 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 thebest board games. “Part of the problem is that around the time I was finishing work on the original game, I was getting more ambitious,” Holland says. Her previous games include This Guilty Land, which casts the players as representations of Justice and Oppression in a battle over slavery in a pre-Civil War United States, and Table Battles, a simplified wargame system that can simulate different conflicts across centuries of history. “Much of my work in board games is pretty overtly experimental and political. The political games centre around observing and understanding models of systems. “Board games actually have an advantage over video games here because they can’t hide anything – it’s all made concrete and transparent. In order to operate the model, in order to play the game, you’ll need to understand the whole picture – which makes them a great tool for helping someone understand real-world systems. In this sense, the process of learning the game is a key source of meaning.” An unsolvable puzzle (Image credit: Mary Holland) As City of Six Moons evolved beyond being ‘just’ a game, Holland drew inspiration from another puzzle that requires the player to work out its rules and language in tandem, Blaž Urban Gracar’s word-search book LOK, and her own experience attempting to figure out the rules for a German edition of hide-and-seek classic Mister X she had bought in a thrift shop. “I had to work out how it played based on the icons, based on commonalities between German and English, and based on my own knowledge of how games tend to function,” Holland says. “It was a very enjoyable experience, and I wondered if I might not build that experience deliberately into this game.” Meet the designer(Image credit: Amabel Holland)Amabel is the co-founder of and a designer forHollandspiele, a “small weird publisher that specializes in small weird games.” She is perhaps best known for Irish Gauge, Northern Pacific, Table Battles, and Agricola, Master of Britain. You can find her on Twitter/X@AmabelHolland. Meet the designer (Image credit: Amabel Holland)Amabel is the co-founder of and a designer forHollandspiele, a “small weird publisher that specializes in small weird games.” She is perhaps best known for Irish Gauge, Northern Pacific, Table Battles, and Agricola, Master of Britain. You can find her on Twitter/X@AmabelHolland. (Image credit: Amabel Holland) Amabel is the co-founder of and a designer forHollandspiele, a “small weird publisher that specializes in small weird games.” She is perhaps best known for Irish Gauge, Northern Pacific, Table Battles, and Agricola, Master of Britain. You can find her on Twitter/X@AmabelHolland. The designer refuses to answer any questions about City of Six Moons’ language or rules, leaving the game in the hands of players to decode and play – even if that means they might never get all the details quite right. (I won’t spoil anything here.) Even so, Holland has carefully designed the symbol-based language to help ease players into the unusual process of translating its rulebook while logically learning how to play along the way. (Beginner tip: start with the first page, which is deliberately easier to decode.) Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more “It was important to me that this not be a ‘language’ or a substitution cipher, but a depiction of systemic relationships and concepts via icons – an iconographic language,” Holland explains. “There aren’t really ‘sentences’ in a traditional sense, so I don’t think one could necessarily use it for narrative purposes.” A fundamentally different experience (Image credit: Mary Holland) Both the language and the game itself are presented as artefacts of an alien civilisation, with Holland imagining the kind of cultural differences between humanity and extraterrestrial beings that might have shaped their unique gaming habits – some of which also speak directly to what Holland sees as Earthly problems in the civilisation-building and tableau-building genres of board games. “I didn’t write a wiki for it or anything like that,” she replies when asked how deep the lore of her alien species runs. “When the game approached its final form, these ideas informed what I felt to be the cultural assumptions these visitors would be working from.” While translating City of Six Moons is more than a prelude to playing the game – it’s an integral part of the complete experience – Holland assures that the fully-decoded rules create a game varied enough to be played again and again, even when part of the puzzle is solved. “It’s going to be a fundamentally different experience once you’ve figured it out, and perhaps a lesser one, but that doesn’t bother me very much,” she says. Still, even getting to that point might take players as long as they would spend playing other games night after night. (Image credit: Mary Holland) With City of Six Moons now in players’ hands, Holland expresses joy at watching other people find their way through its puzzle in different ways. Discussions on BoardGameGeek share potential solutions, messages coded in the same alien language and even in-universe theories about who wrote the game’s rulebook. With players already far down the rabbit hole, its real-life creator teases that the game may hold even more surprises than players expect, too “I’ve seen some of the translations and the assumptions people make are fascinating, both in terms of cultural assumptions and in terms of mechanical blind spots,” she says. “I feel extraordinarily privileged because I get to engage with this game in a way no-one else quite can – I get to observe how others engage with it, how they approach the puzzle. And I know things about the game and its production no-one else does. Because, for example, not everyone has exactly the same components, or exactly the same rulebook.” With City of Six Moons clearly hooking players with its unique mixture of language puzzle, game design commentary and an actual, playable board game, Holland is delighted that her ambitious vision hasn’t been seen as quite so alien itself. For more recommendations of what to play next, check out our guides to must-haveboard games for adultsand thebest card games. 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no bite"1Squid Game season 2 review: “Secures its place as one of the best shows on television right now"2Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special review: “Ncuti Gatwa is as magnetic as ever in this delightful festive treat"3Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses"4Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist"5Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands” GAME REVIEWSMOVIE REVIEWSTV REVIEWS1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension"2Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package"3Path of Exile 2 review: “A stellar start to a thrilling and brutal dark adventure"4Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: “The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years"5Marvel Rivals review: “So preoccupied with trying to be like Overwatch that it forgets to play to its own strengths"1Sonic the 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3Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action” 3Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action” 3 Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action” 4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien” 4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien” 4 The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien” 5Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite” 5Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite” 5 Nightbitch review: “Amy Adams' disappointing dark comedy is all bark and no bite” 1Squid Game season 2 review: “Secures its place as one of the best shows on television right now” 1Squid Game season 2 review: “Secures its place as one of the best shows on television right now” 1 Squid Game season 2 review: “Secures its place as one of the best shows on television right now” 2Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special review: “Ncuti Gatwa is as magnetic as ever in this delightful festive treat” 2Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special review: “Ncuti Gatwa is as magnetic as ever in this delightful festive treat” 2 Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special review: “Ncuti Gatwa is as magnetic as ever in this delightful festive treat” 3Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses” 3Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses” 3 Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses” 4Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist” 4Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist” 4 Skeleton Crew review: “Perfectly captures the vibes of classic Star Wars with a swashbuckling twist” 5Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands” 5Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands” 5 Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands”