Luna Meridian is a near-future lunar colony management game. You're running a five-phase colonization mission on the Moon's surface, managing resources, responding to hazards, and making the decisions that determine whether the colony survives.
Before the lander touches down, you make one decision that shapes everything else: pick your crew. Twenty specialists, a card-based draft, a limited number of swaps. Once you commit, that's it. Who you brought determines your skill coverage, which documents surface, which conflicts come up, and whose judgment you're leaning on when something goes wrong. The draft is the first call you make. It turns out to be the most important one.
The Draft
Before anything else, you pick your crew.
20 specialists dealt out in a card-based draft with a limited number of swaps. Once you commit, that's it - who you picked is who you've got for the whole mission. Your draft determines skill coverage, but also which documents to read surface, which crew conflicts actually come up, and whose judgment you're relying on when something goes wrong. A gap in your roster doesn't always show itself right away. Sometimes you find it later.
The Mission
The campaign runs five phases: site prep and shelter, power and life support, resource extraction, expansion, and sustained autonomy. Each one opens new work areas as the colony grows, and each one asks something different from your crew. At the end of every phase there's a debrief - a look back at what you built, what you missed, and what's coming next.
The Colony
You build on a tile-based isometric lunar surface with six terrain types: high-solar ridges, shadowed craters, ice deposits, flat stable ground, elevated positions, and unstable zones. Each one comes with different constraints and different payoffs. The colony grows across all five phases.
Day and night cycle in real time, and lunar conditions don't stay constant.
The Surface
The Moon has its own conditions to deal with. Solar storms drop power output. Micrometeoroid events can breach habitat seals. Dust grounds EVA operations. Eclipses hit the battery cycle. These aren't just random interruptions - they interact with what you've built, who's on your crew, and what decisions you've already committed to.
Phase 1 runs on a countdown. The lander has finite life support, and before you can build anything meaningful you have to get through the landing phase with enough resources left to work with.
The Decisions
Each work area in the colony has a decision attached to it. You assign a lead specialist, pick from a set of options with real tradeoffs, and confirm. Who's leading matters - their skill level narrows or opens up the available choices, and their field notes in the library give you a sense of what they'd actually recommend, and even countering opinions by other crew members.
Costs come out of your materials, and complexity of configurations will cost you time, but may be worth it. A rush-job will buy you time and cost you less but the downstream effects tend to show up later. Playing it safe isn't necessarily the best bet either, though. Find a combination of building qualities that suits your needs best and the game will reward you.
The Crew
Every character has a personality profile built on four internal metrics. Under sustained pressure, those profiles generate friction between crew members - disagreements about approach, judgment calls that split opinion, moments where someone's weakness becomes a mission problem. Each personality is unique but not always transparent.
Who clashes with who depends entirely on who you drafted. Some combinations hold together well. Others grind each other down over five phases. And occasionally, you'll find conflicting personalities may help your base overall, despite difficulties with staffing.
The Story
The crew's story comes through in documents: handwritten field journals, voice logs, agency memos, Earth comms. Each character has their own threads running through the mission, and the threads connect in ways that take a while to see clearly. Documents you have access to depends on your crew. Leave someone off the roster and their part of the story stays dark. Sometimes stories are unique to each crew combination.
No two drafts produce the same game. With 20 characters in the first series your crew determines which storylines come up, which conflicts run hot, and which parts of the mission feel tight. The five phases are fixed. What happens inside them isn't.
Coming Soon
Luna Meridian is Coming Soon with the full character roster and a complete five-phase campaign unique to each crew draft. Building visuals, audio, and late-game polish are ongoing. More character series are coming through updates with unique stories and completely different characters.
Follow or add to your Wishlist for updates on Luna Meridian on Steam.
