The alien board game people are spending months translating

For many people, reading the rules to complicated board games can already feel like reading an alien language. City of Six Moons takes that one step further. A game about the development of an alien civilization, the rulebook itself (which was “discovered by” Amabel Holland) is written entirely in symbols and icons. You, the player, will need to decipher the rules before you can even get to play — though, in Holland’s eyes, the translation is part of the game itself. 

City of Six Moons was inspired by Holland’s experience translating a German board game she found at a thrift shop, according to an interview with Games Radar. Holland is known for her other innovative high-concept games like Doubt is our product., which is about disinformation spread by the tobacco industry in the twentieth century, and Striking Flint, about the 1937 union strikes in Flint Michigan. City of Six Moons is intentionally opaque, forcing players to engage with complex theories surrounding real-world systems through their interpretations of this alien language.

Even more, you’ll never know if you’re right. “We will never answer any rules questions,” the game’s page says. On Bluesky, Holland said that, once translated, Six Moons is a “functional, replayable game.” In that same post, Holland warned that the translated interpretation of the game may be “perhaps a lesser one. But that loss is a thing I want you to feel; I want it to linger.” 

In an interview with Polygon, Holland expounded on that thought. The sense of loss she alluded to mirrors the difficulties of any attempt at capturing the true essence of a translated work from its native language. Even the best translations are “at best an approximation of a thing, though I guess that’s true of any act of communication,” Holland said. “Once you turn a thing into words, you close off certain meanings, and in that process, the thing becomes distorted and that’s a little sad. You can try to capture it as much as possible, and language gives us ways to embody ambiguity, to let the meanings be slippery, but in the end, anything worth expressing is only approximated in that act of expression. For example, this morning I told my partner ‘I love you’, and I meant it, I said it with my entire heart, but that word feels not only much smaller than the feeling I wanted to express, but also loses some of the nuance, all the various shades of meaning. I feel the same way when I write about a work of art… The words can get close, but never quite get there.”

Unheeding of Holland’s warning, people have dedicated countless hours of their lives to translating City of Six Moons — with one reviewer, Dan Thurot, grappling with it over the course of four months. “The response has been really gratifying and I feel like it trends fairly positive,” Holland told Polygon. “I haven’t heard as much from folks who are playing the game ‘post’-translation. Whether that’s because the puzzle of translation was the big pull for them, or because they’re worried about spoiling it for others, I can’t say. Most of the commentary online about the game does seem to revolve entirely around the central conceit.”

While excitement for the game hasn’t been universal (no pun intended), with some people finding the concept too esoteric and arcane for their hobby preferences, for those who appreciate games that push the bounds of tabletop design, it’s been a standout piece of art. To quote one Bluesky user, “Is [City of Six Moons] really a game? Who cares?”