Currently, configure does not checks/complains about missing gettext.
This can lead to make refusing to compile because missing .gmo files when
building the game.

Naturally I ran configure -q which reported no errors.
But make -s noticed a missing .gmo file which was not created due missing
gettext and therefore, refused to make the game. (Actually I didn't checked if
it created the executable before exiting with failure, I thought it would be
smarter to install gettext instead.)

More info is needed. What do you mean with "missing gettext".

There are several parts needed to successfully build with i18n/l10n support:
- autopoint is needed by autogen.sh (and autogen should complain if autopoint is
missing) 
- some C functions, found in the GNU libc. If not, configure will install the
source files needed to compile a static libintl with the gettext C functions.
- some tools (msgfmt, msgmerge, xgettext - known as GNU gettext-tools), to
create the .po and the .gmo files

Only the presence of those tools is not (automatically) checked.

So, what exactly is missing on your system ? The gettext-tools ?

Commit 83f6d1ca should fix it.
If so, please close this issue.

Fixed in commit 83f6d1ca70c4028e19d5d3edd9640d017750a340