Line of Fire: Burnt Moon Review

Steve Godfrey
Sep 8
10 min read

Line of Fire: Burnt Moon

WBG Score: 6

Player Count: 2

You’ll like this if you like: Udaunted. Radlands

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

In this game you and your opponents are playing opposite forces fighting to hijack/ defend the moon of Io but instead of using human combatants you’ll be using remotely operated robots to do your fighting for you. Still, it’s nice to see the contestants from Robot Wars managed to get themselves jobs after the show ended. I wonder if Craig Charles is gonna be hosting the fight?!

How to battle in lanes

To set up both players create their decks as per the rule book and place the rest of the cards in a supply, then take each of the five site tiles, shuffle them and lay them out in front of themselves in a line with the other players bases in front of that. Then both players, in turn order, place a MOSS unit card in front of one of their sites but not in the same area as their opponent. Each player draws four cards and then secretly chooses one to play for their initiative value. The player with the highest values goes first. On a player's turn they will play as many of the three cards left in their hand as they want, discarding any left at the end of their turn. When you play a personnel card you can take one of the actions on that card. These will never enter the playing field and will mostly serve to bolster your deck by taking cards from the supply and adding them to your discard pile. They will have other actions, for example, letting you draw more cards and even attack units in the field.

When you play one of the many ROV cards (there are basically mechs and will make up most of your deck), you can deploy it to the line. When you deploy you can place a ROV next to one of your sites but with a caveat. You can only have units of the same squad on a base. So you can’t mix up a squad A card and Squad B cards on a site.

If you already have a card of the same type on the field then you can take one of the actions on that card that is then acted out by the matching unit in the field. It’s here that you can take control of bases, attack enemy units and even move units to other sites.

To control a site you first have to have a majority. So add one point for each active card each player has at that site (it’s possible for cards to exhaust, at which point they don’t count for majority) add one for any fortification tile each player had there and add a point if a player already has control of that site. If you have a majority then you flip your site over and score those points. If the enemy already has control then you flip over both sites. When you move you move a unit to an adjacent site taking into account the placement rule from earlier.

When you attack you first see what the attack value is on your card, then compare it to the defence value of your opponent added to the defence value of their site. You can use a different attack value if you have a majority in that area. If your attack value matches or exceeds their defences then you score a hit. The defender then has to remove a card of the matching type from first, their hand, if not then their discard pile, or their draw deck. That card is removed from the game. If they can’t find a matching card in any of those places then the card that was on the field gets removed and taken from the game.

The game will end when either one player wins eight points worth of sites or when one player has eliminated all of their opponents moss cards from the board.

It’s Undaunted Jim, but not as we know it.

Even though the words Undaunted are never mentioned in this game, this is set in the world of Undaunted Callisto and by and large uses that same card play system. This time though in the form of a lane battler. Right from the off I’ll say this is another example of why I like these two designers working together. Every Undaunted game, and seemingly now every game that uses this Undaunted System tries to change stakes. It’s proof that they’re not willing to rest on their laurels. They’ve gone out of their way to change things up and try something different in every iteration and this is definitely their biggest swing by far as they take their card play system away from war games and maps and place it in a different genre of games and it works... for the most part.

There’s a lot of room in this game for some great strategic plays and some fun back and forth as players vie for control of the sites or try to eliminate those all-important MOSS cards. That back and forth, though, is constant and always needs your constant attention. Much like when you’ve been left in charge of all your children on your own, and they try to exploit your weakness. You can’t just win a site and then turn all your attention to the next one. Because control is all majority-based, it may not take much for your opponent to add another card to the site or neutralize one of your cards there and take control. You’ll find that you turn into a futuristic, space version of a plate spinner… which, now that I think about it, is presumably just a plate spinner. You need to keep an eye on all bases, and so the decision to move a unit, while helpful for taking control of one site, could be massively detrimental to the site you just moved it from. The theory behind taking sites sounds pretty simple, just have more stuff, but the execution can be a lot more difficult. The more you play and get a handle on the strategy, you can start to incorporate some nice tactics. Like maybe reinforcing a site and drawing your opponent's attention to it while suddenly snatching control of another one. It’s those fun mind games that can really bring the game into its own.

So the question is, why don’t I just add a new unit to the board and reinforce it? Well here’s where I think they’ve really utilised this system well. Yes you could put all of your TIR units on your sites, for example, but if you do then A) you now have no cards to activate them and B) if they get attacked then you have no cards to take a casualty so you’d immediately be removing them from the sites. It encourages you to plan efficiently and really think about the placement.

Planning and even experience is certainly the name of the game here. Since you’re limited to only having the same squads in each site it’s all too easy to not pay attention and place a squad in a position where it may not be able to move. In some cases that may not matter. You’ll probably be quite happy having this particular squad hanging round in the top site. But at certain points, maybe later in the game you may regret not having given yourself some flexibility to move around a bit. While this is definitely an attention thing, it can easily be an experience thing. Unless you’ve done some serious research before you play then there’s a huge chance you’ll mess this up and your game will most likely be over before you even start.

The only way to combat this is to play with someone else who’s playing for the first time as well. I also find that with games like this it’s nice to play against someone with the same level of experience with the game as you, although it’s not a necessity. The advantage is that if you do lose then the game is easy enough to re rack and try again. In terms of game length, this will ramp up as you both gain experience in the game. Like I said your first couple have the potential to be pretty short affairs, but you’ll soon realise the strategy in the game and before you know it the game will start to become tight, tense affairs.

Have I been burnt by this game?

I have some issues with this game and unfortunately, they’re more than I’d like, especially coming from two designers whose games I. But let’s be honest, not every game is gonna be a hit for everyone.

I’ve found that it can be so easy to have dead cards in this game, which is a massive sin for me. You can pull a card, mainly the MOSS units, and realise that you just can’t do anything with it. You can’t use the control action, either because you're already in control or don’t have the majority to do so. You can’t or just don’t want to move and you can’t attack because you just don’t have enough to beat any cards. It renders that card useless and it’s such a shame. I know some people don’t like the, hit anything on a 10 dice roll rule that inhabits some of the earlier Undaunted games but it at least lets you roll a dice and use that card for something, just on the off chance you might get a cheeky hit. Here though, you just discard the card. This is even more aggravating if you're unlucky enough to have any interference cards in your hand.

Speaking of dice rolls, the lack of dice in this game is also a massive downer for me. The attacking here is just too anticlimactic and mathy and because of that the tension is gone. You know that if someone is attacking your card, they’ve scored a hit, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. They’ve already looked at the game state and they know if they can hit or not. Don’t get me wrong, there will be people out there that love that aspect and love that it’s not based on luck and if that’s the case then chalk that up as another positive. For me, I love the tension of that die roll and the will they, won’t they hit aspects of it, it keeps the excitement going.

I found the cards in this game, to be confusing. Before I clarify that I do want to say that some of the graphic design here is pretty clever. The symbology on the top of the card, once you know how it works and that it denotes the cards action is a great idea to have on it, knowing that the rest of the card is going to be covered up. The reason I find them confusing is largely because of the names and I had this in Undaunted 2200 but it seems to be more so here. Of course, this is a sci fi game and you don’t want to use regular names for things and I’m absolutely here for games creating their own names and investing in the world building. I’m also aware that in this game in particular we’re dealing with drones essentially. But nothing here really helped me understand what their specialty was without studying their list of actions over again. Obviously, this is something you get used to as you play more often but I wonder how many games that would take for different people. This isn’t helped at all by the art work.

The artwork for every card is different, which normally I’d encourage. But with a game like this where you have names to associate with different unit types, I think having say all the MOSS A units having the same art and all the TIR A having the same art with some slight variations for the B squads would have worked better to help with understanding or at least clicking with the game faster. I will say though, I love the art in this game. Leonard Dupond’s art is beautiful and I can see why they’d want to showcase it on every card. I’d honestly hate to be the person to have to distil it down to a few pieces but I think in this case it was maybe needed.

Always two, there are?

In this game you get two small rulebooks. One gameplay manual and one action manual. I’ll be honest, they’re infuriating. Normally when you see dual rulebooks, one is a quick start, how to play type affair to get you up and running and the other is more in-depth stuff as you get into the game and this situation can work for the most part. These two though feel like one big rule book that has been cut up and the pieces randomly distributed amongst the two books and it makes them confusing and you’ll come to realise that there is no logical reason for why things are separated.

For example, the rule for attacking is in the action manual. You then have to see if you have a majority to see which attack number you're using on the card. The majority explanation is in the Gameplay manual if you need clarification on how to work that out. You then go back to the action manual to see how the rest of the attack action plays out. Once the attack is done and you hit you need to find how to resolve casualties and that rule is in? you guessed it, the gameplay manual It’s not even like that rule needs to be in the gameplay manual, it’s just there in a random spot not linked to any other action around it. It’s infuriating because the two actions that use it are both in the action manual so surely it would be logical to put the resolution to those in the same book?

The reason it frustrates me, the reason I’m making a big deal about it is because it makes the game annoying to learn and I can see so many people being put off by it. You’ve seen my score and you know that this isn’t a game that I love and that’s fine, but this could be a game that someone else could love and I’d hate to think that they’d be potentially put off from the game because they couldn't get past the rules. Even more so is that, like the other Undaunted games, this isn’t really that difficult of a game to learn and the rule books make it counterintuitive to learn than the others. Right, rant over, let’s move on.

Line of Fire Burnt Moon is a rare miss for me from these two designers. The game isn’t awful and I do think that if you like the look and sound of this, then I would suggest a try before you buy because you never know, this could still be for you. In fact, a couple of things it does are things that I’ve heard a few people say they aren’t keen on other undaunted games and if that’s you then this could be the game for you. While this game isn’t one that I love, I’ve still gotta throw respect out to David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin for trying something different.