Hello again, treasure hunter!
You picked a faction. You bought a box. You have some models on the table and now somebody has said "want a game?" and you have realised you do not actually know what a legal force looks like.
Good news: it is simpler than every other miniatures game you have played. Genuinely, not in the marketing sense.
The Rule That Makes Moonstone Different
There are no points values.
That is not a simplification. There is no cost printed on the card, no list-building budget, no efficiency maths to do at midnight before an event. The rules say you and your opponent agree how many characters you each want to play with, you each pick that many from your collection, and you play.
The recommended sizes, for a game of about an hour and a half to two hours:
- Two players: six characters each.
- Three players: four each.
- Four players: three each.
That is it. That is troupe building.
Say the objection out loud: without points, what stops someone taking the six best characters in the faction? Nothing does. That is the actual answer, and it is the design working as intended. Moonstone decides games through card play, bluffing and Moonstone harvesting rather than through raw statline, so "the six strongest models" is a much less meaningful phrase here than it would be anywhere else. Everyone brings their favourites. Everyone is fine.
The Two Restrictions, and Both Are Easy
One: pick a faction, and stay in it. There are four, and the crest at the top right of every Character Card tells you which one it belongs to. You may only pick characters from your chosen faction.
Two: each character once. No two of the same model.
Beyond those, the rules are explicit that there are no restrictions on which characters you take.
The Four Factions, and Who Lives in Them
Here is the shape of each one, with the keyword groups the rules themselves say each typically contains, and how deep the character pool actually goes.
The Commonwealth: Humans, Giants and Gnomes. 45 characters. The closest thing Moonstone has to a conventional force, which is exactly why it is a comfortable first pick. Then you notice the giants.
The Dominion: Goblins, Faeries and Trolls. 61 characters, the deepest pool in the game by a distance. Imagine a Monty Python sketch that got out of hand. If you want the most options and the least dignity, this is the door.
The Leshavult: Fauns, Spirits and Cultists. 34 characters. Folk horror with the volume up. Woodland things that want something from you and are not going to explain what.
The Shades: Spirits, Risen and Psychopomps. 32 characters. The dead of Tauber, who did not leave, and who are still the same grasping idiots they were alive. We wrote them their own guide because they deserved more than a paragraph.
Choose one if: you want depth of choice, take Dominion. You want a line that behaves, take Commonwealth. You want atmosphere, take Leshavult. You want the best sculpts in the game and a faction that is quietly hilarious, take Shades.
Still torn? Our faction guide goes deeper on how each one feels to play.
Cross-Faction: The Thing Nobody Tells New Players
Some characters belong to two factions at once. A cross-faction character can be selected by a troupe that has chosen either of its parent factions.
This matters more than it sounds. 32 of Moonstone's 140 characters are legal in more than one faction. That is nearly a quarter of the game, and it means the model you fell in love with may well be available to the faction you actually picked.
It also means a box you bought for one troupe is often not wasted when you drift to another. The Cursed, for instance, is four models where every single one is legal in two factions.
We went through all 140 and listed every one of them, because it is genuinely tedious to work out by hand. That list is here.
Reading a Character Card Without Panicking
Four numbers do most of the work.
- Melee, with a reach in inches. Across the game this runs from 1 to 6.
- Arcane, which is your magic. From 0 up to 7. A 0 means this character does not do that, and plenty do not.
- Evade, which is how hard they are to pin down. This can be negative, and a giant with poor evade is not a mistake, it is the trade.
- Energy pips, which double as your health track. The range across the whole game is 1 to 14, and the great majority of characters sit between 6 and 9.
That last number is the one to watch when you are choosing. A pair of 2-pip familiars and a 14-pip monster are not interchangeable slots, even though the troupe size rule counts them the same. Six models is six models whether they are tiny or enormous, which is the single most interesting tension in Moonstone list building and the reason a big model is a real commitment rather than an obvious upgrade.
A Practical Way to Build Your Six
Start with a Troupe Box. They exist precisely for this. Rogues Gallery at $50 gives you four models that share the Rogue keyword. Gribbleboggers at $41 gives you three Dominion Goblins. Either is most of the way to a six.
Then fill the gaps deliberately. Look at what your box cannot do and buy for that, not for what looks coolest. If your four are all fast and fragile, the next purchase is somebody who can stand still.
Then, and only then, buy a big one. Gotchgut the Giant, Brunhilde the Giant, Boulder the Troll at $35 each. They are a sixth of your force and a much larger share of its weight.
The Best Value: a two-player starter. Dusk till Dawn at $105 or Life & Death Struggle at $125 give you both sides of a game, and we compared them properly here.
The Tool We Actually Use for This
A reference we love: Moonstone Companion at Dice and Decks Guild Hall. Free, no ads, and it does the tedious half of everything above.
Every character with full stats, abilities and rules text, so you are not flipping through cards to check who is cross-faction. Troupes you can build and save, which is the actual job this article is about. The rules, glossary and errata in your pocket. Building a six on your phone in front of the shelf beats doing it from memory, and it costs nothing to try.
The Three Things That Are Not Models
The Rulebook, $35. A hundred pages and change, and only part of it is rules: the v1.3 core rules in full, then fifty-odd pages of history and maps, with seven alternate scenarios and thirty-plus character profiles in between. That middle section is the part most players get the most out of.
The Game Deck, $20. Moonstone resolves fights through cards rather than dice. You need one.
The Stat Card Errata Pack 2025, $21. Twenty-three updated cards in one pack. If your collection predates the 2025 errata, this is the difference between holding a correct printed card and a page off a printer.
One Last Thing Before Your First Game
Troupe size is agreed, not fixed. If you own four models and your opponent owns twenty, agree on four. The rules are built for that conversation, and the only real consequence of a smaller troupe is a shorter game. Nobody needs to buy anything to play you.
That is worth knowing before somebody tells you that you need a "proper" collection first. You do not.
So: which faction, and who are your six? Tell us your list, and if you are stuck on the last slot, that is exactly the kind of argument we enjoy having behind the counter.
May your bluffs hold and your Moonstones stay stolen.