The Latest Google Doodle Is A Fun Game About The Moon

The latest Google Doodle game is surprisingly fun, while also being educational about one of the coolest things in nature: The night sky.

The Doodle celebrates the rise of the Half Moon in November by giving us a fun tile-based game that’s a bit like an advanced tic-tac-toe. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this Doodle, which is now a recurring monthly game where you can earn special monthly wildcards by playing.

You have to win three rounds of the game to reach the moon and earn one of four monthly cards, which you can play in future rounds to gain special bonuses. It’s a bit tricky to learn at first, or at least it was for me, but once you get the hang of it it’s quite fun.

In each phase you’re given a grid that becomes a bit more complicated each tier. It looks like this:

This is the first phase. The second is more complex and the third takes a new shape as well. You take turns playing against the computer—er, the moon—placing tiles that represent different phases of the moon. You can get “Phase Pairs” that are worth one point and are simply two of the same cards next to one another. You can get Full Moon Pairs, which tally two cycles of the moon to equal a full moon. You can also line up three or more phases of the moon in a row, earning a point per tile, though this is more difficult and I only managed to do it once in my time with the game.

You get bonus points for every scoring tile, and if you get more than the bot, you move on to the next round. There are a total of nine new boards to play through this month and earn four new wildcards in the process. Head over to the Google homepage to give it a shot. The sky’s the limit and all that jazz.