Google’s famous doodles – the illustrations that appear almost every day in place of the Google logo – are known to sometimes take the form of surprisingly great games. Today’s doodle is no exception: Rising of the Crescent Moon is a strategic card game that celebrates the crescent point in the October lunar cycle.
Each three-level playthrough starts with an empty 3×3 board, connected by vertical and horizontal lines. Your hand consists of three random moon phase cards, and on your turn you can place a card on the board. The goal is to pair matching cards, pair cards that together form a full man (i.e. a waning crescent moon with a waxing moon), or place cards in the order of the moon’s cycle. The board itself changes and grows in levels 2 and 3, and if you beat the computer all three times you can unlock a legendary card.
Those legendary cards are there to please the deckbuilding fanatics among us. October’s legendary cards include ‘Leonid’s Meteor Shower’, which destroys any two cards on the board when played; “Hunter Moon,” named after the supermoon visible on October 17, destroys the cards on the board controlled by the Crescent and returns them to the deck. Google told Polygon that there will be legendary cards for every month of the year, so eventually you’ll have a pile of wildcards to choose from.
At the end of each level you get bonus points for every card in play in one of your combos. This means that as the game progresses you will have to race to convert cards before your turns are over. .
Rising of the Crescent Moon is a challenge, not because the computer puts up a good fight, but because it’s difficult to remember the moon cycle and plan ahead for combos when you don’t know what your next cards will be. I’ve come up with a combination of 13 cards – meaning I’ve linked the entire lunar cycle, plus five more cards – and have brushed up on my understanding of the lunar cycle along the way.
The game is satisfying and just hard enough to keep me busy, but it’s short and sweet enough that I can play a few rounds without being distracted from what I was about to do when I opened Google this morning.