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A wise man once said: . 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 , if you need the URL) you'll find a neat little strategy/card game that someone in Mountain View presumably cooked up in the . 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 [[link]] 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 [[link]] 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 [[link]] 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.