Moonstone

What is Moonstone

Moonstone is a fantasy skirmish game for 2 to 4 players from Goblin King Games. It’s set on Tauber, an isle of fairytale and folklore where humans, goblins, faeries, gnomes, giants, fauns, trolls and more mostly get along. There’s little to no war, and most disagreements are squabbles.

The trouble is the moonstones. On clear nights they sprout out of the ground “like so many crystalline toadstools,” and the Wizards at the Tower of Grommel pay well for any brought in intact. The catch is that sunlight turns them to dust, so every troupe has one night to dig up as many as it can. Fighting over them is, in the rules’ words, “almost inevitable.”

The tone is light. Goblin King Games lists “flatulent pug knights and a deity named Gary” among the game’s features, and Goonhammer’s review notes the undead Shades often get called the “fundead.”

Four factions are playable, each marked by a symbol on its character cards:

Commonwealth (the sun). Typically humans, giants and gnomes.
Dominion (the moon). Typically goblins, faeries and trolls.
Leshavult (the stag skull). Typically fauns, spirits and cultists.
Shades (the warrior’s skull). Typically spirits, risen and psychopomps.

Some characters are cross-faction and can be taken by either of two factions. Goonhammer counted over 100 characters in 2024.

Moonstone won four awards at UK Games Expo 2023: Best Miniatures Range and Best Miniatures Rules, in both the Judges’ Choice and the People’s Choice.

How it plays

Grab the stones, not the kills. Before deployment, one player drops seven four-sided dice over the middle of the board. Each die is a moonstone, and the number showing is its depth. Each Harvest action digs one level, and at zero the character picks it up. Whoever holds the most moonstones at the end of turn 4 (sunrise) wins. A tie goes to a sudden death turn.
No points. Troupe size sets the game size: 4 characters each for a beginner game, 5 for a fast one, 6 for a full game. In three- and four-player games the rules recommend 4 and 3 characters each.
Energy drives everything. Each turn, a character gets one energy token for each blue dot left on its health bar, so wounded characters do less. A character can take as many actions as it can pay for: step, harvest, attack, or use its abilities.
Alternating activations, plus reaction steps. Players take turns activating one character. After every action, each opponent can spend 1 energy to move one of their models 1”, to duck behind cover or slip out of reach.
Melee is a guessing game. Both players draw from a shared 18-card Melee Deck, then reveal one card at the same time: Falling Swing, Rising Attack, Thrust, Sweeping Cut, High Guard or Low Guard. Each card reads off damage dealt and suffered against the other. A High Guard shuts down a Falling Swing and earns a free follow-up attack. Pairs and triples of the same card make critical hits, and each character has its own upgraded Signature Move.
Magic runs on bluffing. For arcane abilities, the active player draws from a 21-card Arcane Deck, plays a card face down and declares what it is. The defender, holding six cards of their own, decides whether to call the bluff. Getting that call wrong, either way, can go badly. The deck also holds catastrophe cards.
Simple terrain. Obstacles, barriers, water and wooded patches each have a short rule, and faeries fly over water, woods and obstacles.

How to start

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Moonstone Basic Rules (free PDF)

The core rules, v3, straight from Goblin King Games.

Read the rules for free. The core rules, every character card, the FAQ, errata, scenarios and the organised play pack are all on the downloads page. There are colour vision deficiency versions of the cards and decks too.
Try it on paper. Goblin King Games makes paper stand-ins for the characters, free on the same page. Add a Moonstone card deck and you can play before buying any miniatures.
Get the starter set. Life & Death Struggle is the current two-player starter: four Shades of Moonreach and four Faun miniatures in resin, the card deck, a rules pamphlet, energy counters, a measuring widget, dice, and two Psychopomp tokens. Miniature Market lists it at $125. The miniatures come unpainted and need assembly. An older two-player starter pitted the Commonwealth against the Dominion.
Grow your troupe. Troupe boxes hold three characters that work well together, so two boxes from one faction make a full six-model troupe. The official troupe building guide suggests including a healer and building around a keyword leader like the Goblin King or Mama Gimble.
Want the book? The printed rulebook adds the setting, scenarios and character profiles. Miniature Market lists it at $35.

Community & reviews

Goblin King Games keeps an events calendar with regular game nights in the UK, the US, Canada and Germany, and tournaments run through Longshanks. Players who run demos and events can join the Goblin Scheme, which gets them early previews and playtest material.