How to play

What you're doing

You have $50 billion and 15 years. Starting the day NASA's Artemis III lands, you plan a real Moon base using actual hardware — habitats, reactors, rovers, ISRU plants — until it's self-sufficient. At the end, one of 8 narrative archetypes labels what kind of planner you turned out to be.

The 4 phases

1. SCOUT (Years 1–3, $8B). Robotic landers map the south pole and stake a landing site. No crew yet. Heavy Cargo Lander is the critical unlock — it gates five Phase 2 techs.
2. LAND (Years 4–6, $12B). First boots on the Moon since 1972. You buy the habitat, crew lander, and power. Then the Night Survival check runs: does your base make it through 354 hours of −173 °C darkness?
3. SURVIVE (Years 7–10, $15B). ISRU comes online. You start extracting water ice, making oxygen, reducing your resupply dependency. Science labs start publishing.
4. THRIVE(Years 11–15, $15B). The base becomes self-sustaining. Propellant production, industrial mining, the far-side telescope, commercial partnerships — now you're building a legacy.

Rules that will trip you up

• Phase budgets don't roll over. Unspent cash is lost when you advance.
• Techs are phase-locked. Once you leave Phase 1, you can't go back and buy the Heavy Cargo Lander you skipped.
• Prereqs span phases. Some Phase 4 techs need specific Phase 3 purchases. Plan ahead.
• Dilemmas have real consequences.Each phase fires one event — a political fight, a technical incident, a discovery. Your choice moves cost, political support, science points, and crew safety. There's no right answer; each branch optimises one axis at the expense of another.
• Night Survival is binary. You pass with nuclear power; you fail without it. Failure costs $2B in emergency resupply and you watch your base freeze in a dramatic reveal.

How you're scored

Six 0–100 axes averaged into a single grade:

• Sustainability— ISRU level, power redundancy, ECLSS closure, years the base can run without Earth's help.
• Science — lab + telescope multipliers on top of accumulated research points from dilemmas.
• Safety — medical bay, radiation shielding, evac capability, crew incidents, power redundancy.
• Efficiency — output per dollar spent. Big budget + small base = bad.
• Scale — crew capacity, habitat volume, surface coverage, total mass delivered.
• Legacy — political support, international partnerships, commercial revenue, public engagement from dilemma tags.

Your profile across all six axes picks one of 8 archetypes: Visionary, Engineer, Scientist, Commander, Diplomat, Entrepreneur, Pragmatist, or Maverick. The archetype is the punchline — collect all 8 across multiple runs.

Difficulty

Three tiers gated by budget and realism constraints:

• Normal ($50B) — the canonical experience. No surprises.
• Hard ($35B) — congressional politics kick in. Budget cuts, continuing resolutions, dust degradation on exposed systems.
• Expert ($25B) — TRL gates enforced. Some techs fail qualification. Landing failures eat payload.

Also there's a free-form Builder

If you want to skip the 4-phase structure entirely and just drag hardware onto a 2028–2043 timeline with a single budget pool, click “Or open the free-form Builder mode →” on the intro. Same scoring, different pacing.