Welcome To... vs Welcome to the Moon: Which Should You Buy?

In Welcome To..., you're a 1950s suburb planner with a pencil and a street of empty houses. Three cards flip each round, pairing a house number with a perk like a pool, a park, or a fence, and everyone picks from the same three combos at once. You're building rising number sequences down three streets, and every number you write closes a door somewhere else. The choices are usually binary, but they never let up. It's quietly cutthroat, except the person you're cutting is yourself. There's a race for City Plan bonus cards, but mostly you're heads-down on your own sheet.

Welcome to the Moon keeps that same core (shared flips, ascending numbers, racing for common missions) and then swaps the scenery under your feet. The box holds eight different boards, each with its own scoring quirk, chained into a replayable campaign. One chapter takes 25-45 minutes, so you can play a slice without committing to the whole arc. You write on dry-erase boards instead of paper pads, which sounds great until you meet the included markers. Their nibs are too fat for the tiny spaces, so grab thin whiteboard pens on day one. Trust me on the pens.

This is where they split cleanly. Welcome To... teaches in about two minutes and the tough choices start on turn one. There's exactly one ruleset, so once anyone at the table has it, they have it for good. It's the version I'd hand to a family gathering or a friend who claims they don't like board games, because there's nothing to relearn and nothing to look up.

Welcome to the Moon asks more of you. The rules shift with every map, and players consistently say the rulebook flipping pulls you out of the flow. Some nights you'll be reading rules instead of relaxing, and that's just the deal you're signing. If you enjoy learning a fresh wrinkle each session, that's a feature. If you want one clean ruleset you internalize and play on autopilot, the constant resets will genuinely bug you.

On paper, Welcome To... says 1-100 players, and while real players cap it around 5-6 before the pace drags, that flexibility is real. It scales from solo (the solo mode holds up) to a couple to a crowd, with everyone playing off the same flips so there's no downtime. The catch is interaction: there's almost none. You're really racing a shared deck, so it can feel like quiet parallel solitaire, and a lucky run of flips can favor someone else. But as a 25-minute puzzle you can pull out anytime, with anyone, it's hard to beat.

Welcome to the Moon is the more generous box over the long haul. Eight genuinely different puzzles plus a branching campaign means it keeps giving for weeks, and the solo mode comes with AI opponents at scaling difficulties. That said, it shines brightest small. Solo and two-player folks get the most out of it, and plenty of reviewers say they wouldn't bother gathering a big group for it. So the trade is roughly this: Welcome To... has more range in who it fits, the Moon has more range in what it does.