City of Six Moons
City of Six Moons: A boardgame designed by aliens.
“Inside the box you will find the components needed to play the game, and a rulebook written entirely in symbols and icons. You will need to decipher the game's rules yourself. You will never know whether you've gotten it right or not. […] The designer will never answer any rules questions.”
At first I assumed this was something along the lines of Codex Seraphinianus, an art object with no underlying meaning/consistency; but then I watched the 16-minute Shut Up & Sit Down review, and it sounds like the game is more like a puzzle, in which the rulebook and components are consistent with each other and the main goal is to figure out the rules of the game, even though there’s no way to be sure whether you’ve figured them out “correctly.” Also, there’s a fan wiki in which players discuss what they’ve figured out and their interpretations of things.
The review also touches on some interesting ideas about lenses through which we interpret boardgames, and aspects of a game’s underlying ideas that can come through even with labels removed, and ways in which experience with getting rules wrong in other games can prepare you for playing this one, and more.