He invented the deck-building game. Then he made one that kills you.

Donald X. Vaccarino invented deck-building by accident. Around 2006, he was working on a fantasy exploration game, and the combat system wasn't working. To fix it, he invented a deck that each player builds as they play. That patch became Dominion: Spiel des Jahres 2009, over two and a half million copies with expansions, an entire genre born from a fix to another game.

Then twenty years within that genre. One Dominion expansion after another.

At some point, Vaccarino felt the need to get back to something different, and he started with an exercise: remaking San Juan, a game by another author, in his own way. Nothing ambitious, just to get back into the swing of things. Then his group brought Pandemic Legacy to the table. In that game, there's a deck that decides which locations will be affected by the contagion, and players put cards on it, partly choosing their own fate. It was there, during a break in that game, that Vaccarino had the idea for Moon Colony Bloodbath: a deck-building game where the deck belongs to no one. It's just one, and everyone builds it together.

It's the opposite of Dominion. There, everyone cultivates their own garden, safe from others. Here, there's a common deck, everyone puts their cards into it, and that deck makes things happen to everyone at the same time. The man who had taught the world to build his own personal deck, after twenty years, wanted to make it collective.

The game is being released by Rio Grande Games in 2025, illustrated by Franz Vohwinkel in an atomicpunk style: smiling astronauts, chrome, a 1950s utopia painted on the box. But the story of Moon Colony Bloodbath isn't in the name stolen from an album. It's in an author who, at the end of his career, wanted to dismantle his most famous invention to see what would happen.

At the beginning of a game, no one dies. You draw cards, you work, you build buildings, people accumulate in your colony. The engine runs well.

Then troubles begin, and troubles have a ladder. Thirteen Event cards enter the deck one by one, always in the same order, from the mildest to the fiercest. First hunger and bureaucracy. Then robots, who don't behave as the colonists expected. Then accidents, air leaks, lunar earthquakes.

The game doesn't keep you in the dark about anything. The card that will kill your colonists is there, a few turns ahead, and you see it coming. Often you were the one who added it. Yet the next turn you go back to building.

It's the same sentence printed on the box, below the astronauts. And it's the same one every group repeats before starting: this time we'll make it to the end. Almost no one does. The game ends on a card called "Instruction Manual", and the irony is all there. The instructions for survival are at the bottom of the deck, when they are no longer useful.

One question remains. If you see disaster coming, if you know when it will strike, why do you keep building instead of stopping and consolidating? The answer isn't that you're deluding yourself. You see the danger very clearly. It's that you put that danger there yourself, and this ties you to the table more than you imagine.

Psychology

The Escalation of Commitment In 1976, psychologist Barry Staw studied why individuals and companies continue to pour resources into ventures they know are failing, instead of cutting their losses. He found a crucial detail. Those who personally chose the initial direction are precisely the ones who invest the most when things get worse. You don't persist despite failure. You persist more because the ruin bears your signature, and stopping would mean admitting that the signature was wrong. Moon Colony Bloodbath builds that mechanism card by card. You've seen every disaster enter the deck. Many you chose yourself. And every turn, the rational move—to stop—loses against the idea that, since you built that engine, it's up to you to keep it running. Source — Barry M. Staw, "Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy", 1976

There's a coincidence worth mentioning. The title of Staw's study is a line from an anti-Vietnam War song. The psychologist started right there, observing how governments continued to fund a war they knew was lost.

Vaccarino's game originates from an album. The phenomenon that explains it comes from a song. Half a century apart, and beneath the same discovery: the most dangerous moment is not when you ignore what awaits you. It's when you know it, you built it with your own hands, and for that very reason, you can't stop.

Moon Colony Bloodbath Donald X. Vaccarino Rio Grande Games Deck-building Escalation of Commitment Mechanism Frogames