Today's Google Doodle is an alarmingly compelling card game about defeating mankind's oldest enemy: The Moon
A wise man once said: The Moon is disgusting. He forgot to mention that it was also stupid. Strategically inept. A trifle to conquer on the battlefield.
This is the lesson I've learnt from today's Google Doodle, anyway. I would not ordinarily write about the Google Doodle, being as it is only a Doodle on Google. But today's Google Doodle is more than a Doodle, it's a game you can play on Google, dude (el).
If you head over to Google (that's google.com, if you need the URL) you'll find a neat little strategy/card game that someone in Mountain View presumably cooked up in the free 20% of their work day. It's themed around the lunar phases, and sees you face off against a persistently chirpy half-moon in a quest to amass points.
How do you earn points, you ask? Each turn you and your enemy moon select between three cards (you each get a new card every turn). Each card represents a phase of the Moon: crescent, half, full, whatever they call it when there's no moon, and so on. Your task is to slap your cards down on the board in a way that either matches a card next to it, creates a full moon with the card next to it (so, a crescent moon next to a three-quarter moon would count), or that establishes a lunar cycle.
That last one is more complicated, and it's also the most lucrative option. Essentially, if you can lay down a track of cards that represents a complete part of a lunar cycle (for instance, a crescent, then a half, then a three-quarter moon), you get points for each card. The longer your complete lunar cycle, the more points.
It's actually pretty addictive? The boards get more complex as you progress through the game, and at some point the whole thing began handing me bonus, once-per-playthrough cards that I could deploy to do wild nonsense like destroying two random cards on the board, or destroying cards controlled by the other side. It's a genuinely engaging accretion of complexity that meant I spent far too long playing it before I started writing this article.
My only problem, as I suggested up top, is that the Moon is a fool. Maybe I just haven't gotten to the harder levels yet, but it's not too hard to absolutely bamboozle the celestial idiot every round. I sometimes had to sit and watch it pass up obvious opportunities to get one over on me more than once. It's a little underwhelming on that front, but it's also a free game you can play by visiting Google, so I don't feel compelled to shout about it too much. Besides, it's nice to know I'm smarter than the Moon.