Pyramid: Pyramid Review: Shooting the Moon: All Is Fair in Love and War

Pyramid Review

Shooting the Moon: All Is Fair in Love and War

Published by Black and Green Games

Written by Emily Care Boss

Cover & Illustrated by Jennifer Manley Lee

44-page digest-sized b&w softcover; $15

Shooting the Moon: All Is Fair in Love and War is a sequel of sorts to Breaking the Ice: A Game of Love For Two. Both share similar themes -- the course of true love -- but where Breaking the Ice took two people on three dates to find love between them, in Shooting the Moon three people are involved. This is a more adversarial game in which two rivals pursue a shared Beloved. It can be run with two players, each taking the role of two Suitors vying for the attention of a shared Beloved, or alternatively with three players in which case the third takes the role of the Beloved.

The Suitors have a shared goal, the Prize, something unique to the Beloved. Their attempts to gain this Prize will drive the story forward. If the Beloved is playing, her goal is to achieve a Dream, some kind of ambition. Suitors and Beloved race each other to their Prize or Dream, all the while throwing Hurdles into the path of their rivals. Overcoming a Hurdle gains Suitor or Beloved points towards these goals, while every Hurdle encountered will force a character to change and grow, a process to which all of the players contribute. It is the interplay between the characters that drives the storytelling of Shooting the Moon onwards.

The first thing to decide is the setting, which . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.

Article publication date: February 9, 2007

Copyright © 2007 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.