Category: After the Virus

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Beefy Hero

When designing new cards for The Long Cold, finding new and interesting combos was central, and Trusted Companion is a perfect example of this.

With Trusted Companion by your side, you can have a Car ready to go while using the Horse to handle daily stuff. You can have permanent weapons such as Machete without removing the option of Pistol, Flamethrower and the like if your arm gets wounded. Plus, you actually get and extra space for a wound, making your weapon management all that safer. The other way to get an extra wound space requires exercise, but can definitely be worth it too. Going into close combat with zombies is dangerous though, so be sure to bring a Knife and some Bandage.

But do you know what the best thing with an extra wound space is? You can eat some Canned Food. Or a Cow.

So who’s the hero? You? The Trusted Companion? Or the Cow? The answer is in the title/headline.

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Merry Christmas!

Time flies by, and we are deep into the play-testing of the 5th expansion for Terraforming Mars. That was just a tease, we’re not going to say anything more about the Turmoil expansion now. Oh, did I say that out loud? Oh well, now you know. Turmoil will probably be the only addition to Terraforming Mars in 2019, as we have more projects in our pipeline that need some love. 2 of them will be briefly described in our second newsletter, which will be sent out in a week or so, so please subscribe if you haven’t done so yet.

In Essen, we released the third extra character for After the Virus, our zombie card game. It is now available as a printable pdf in the side menu of its After the Virus game page but here it is in all its glory:

Starting with the tunnel in play, Bill can make really good use of persons in the deck. Saving survivors is a thrill, almost too easy. But having all those persons in play means your deck is quickly running out, and will soon be overrun by zombies which you’d rather have outside the tunnel. As stated, this is the third new character for After the Virus, the other two being Angela and Mac (also available from the game page). With a total of 7 characters, you’ll have many hours of joyful zombie-maiming action and desperate escapes as you complete the campaign with each one. Which one do you prefer? Which one is the best? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for this year, we hope you’ll continue to follow us as we enter 2019. But first, let’s take a long and jolly Christmas break to play some games with friends and family 🙂

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

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Mac is here!

A couple of weeks back, we started a contest for After The Virus, letting people guess the starting deck of our new character Mac:

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The image gives away a few things, and the winner was able to guess 8 out of the 10 starting cards, including the one that starts in play. Here is Mac in all his coughing glory:

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Congratulations to Robert Smithwick for winning this contest! He will receive an After The Virus t-shirt and a promo pack containing Mac, Angela, and Bill…

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Upcoming Essen

We are already working hard to get all details ready for the international games fair Spiel’18 in Essen, Germany, which is at the end of October. We hope to see you there! Our booth number is 3-O103, close to where we’ve been all these 7 years since we started FryxGames. Our new items this year are of course the 2 latest expansions for Terraforming Mars: Prelude and Colonies. We will also sell the promo pack, containing all 10 promo cards released thus far for the game, including the 3 corporations from the BoardGameGeek contest.

This is the price list for Essen this year:
Terraforming Mars: 55€
TM: Hellas & Elysium: 20€
TM: Venus Next: 25€
TM: Prelude: 20€
TM: Colonies: 30€
TM: Promo pack (10 promos): 8€

TM: Everything: 120€ (save 38€)
TM: Expansions: 75€ (save 28€)

After the Virus: 25€
Fleets (few left): 50€
Space Station: 20€
Brawling Barons: 5€ / deck

All items can be pre-ordered for pick-up at Essen. Just e-mail us at info@fryxgames.se, give us your name and the items you want to pre-order.

Newsletter

We have set up an e-mail list for our newsletter, which we aim to send out every three months. We want to send the first newsletter this week, so be sure to subscribe to it by clicking here.

Terraforming Mars Digital App

Soon you will be able to play Terraforming Mars on your digital devices! Although the launch has been postponed to late September or early October, things are falling into place and we look forward to the full release with great anticipation! To learn more, visit the app on Steam by clicking here.

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The image used on the Colonies box. Image by Isaac Fryxelius.

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Conflict of Interests

As promised, we give you a new character for After the Virus. As tough as Robert may be, he’s up for a challenge when Angela comes to town to take control of the neighborhood gang. Having lost her biker brothers to the zombies, she’s been spending several weeks searching for a new community with which to battle the zombies and claim her revenge. But with all that anger along with last week’s release of the Confrontative Variant, where players can play against each other, it is not quite clear who she’ll be aiming her rifle at.

Angela

Angela is the fifth character for After the Virus. You can download a print-and-play-friendly pdf here. With a rifle in play from the get go, she has a way of dealing with the zombies in her discard pile, which will abound with the help of Concussion Grenades and a trusted MC. As with the other characters, you will find some of the campaign missions easier, and some others significantly harder to complete. And if you get too frustrated with the campaign, just challenge your friend to a duel with the Confrontative Variant.

In fact, head over to the BoardGameGeek forum and help us decide which is the new gang leader: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/28914544#28914544

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App Trailer

For anyone interested in the digital app for Terraforming Mars, Asmodee Digital has released a teaser trailer for it on youtube, which we present below:

We greatly look forward to the release of the app.

Meanwhile, we’d better put our heads together to survive the zombie apocalypse in Jacob’s new game After the Virus. If you haven’t played it yet, make sure to check it out here and on BoardGameGeek, and if you want to see it played, Jacob has been recording some play-throughs to help people get into the game. If cooperative games aren’t really your thing, make sure to stay tuned for next week’s update, where we introduce a new game mode for After the Virus 🙂

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Down to Earth… kind of

One of the few attractive features of the Venusian surface is the possibility of finding interesting compounds in the soil. Those compounds can be interesting as additions in Martian soils, allowing for new specialized organisms, and exotic nutrients. This was Aphrodite’s main business until they joined the terraforming process and got a contract for developing Venus. Now they are also looking into making the Venusian soil itself fertile, for use in the new colonies there.

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Survival lesson #1

When dealing with zombies, you need to know some basic facts:

A) You definitely need weapons.

B) Unfortunately, weapons have a tendency to run out of ammunition.

C) In those circumstances, you may have only one option.

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What? A zombie FryxGame?

Yes, apparently. Just like Jacob one day thought : ‘I should make a game about the terraforming of Mars’, he had another revelation: ‘I should make a game about zombies’. Not quite as unique a theme as terraforming, but he managed to get FryxGames to like the game enough for publishing, and now the time has come for…

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A cooperative deck building game where your deck is invaded by more and more zombies each time you reshuffle, your tension building  while you desperately try to complete the current mission. In most deckbuilders you mainly add cards to your deck to get stronger, but in After the Virus many cards stay in your play area and you have to deal with your deck getting worse as the game progresses.
How it plays? You figure it out (for now):

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You may have noticed that our heroes (and zombies) have rather large heads. Our graphic designer for this game, Daniel Fryxelius explains:

When I first got the challenge to make the art for After the virus I was into some kind of comic book style. Kind of like what they used for Zombicide. Blood, slime, decay, but in a comic style so that it will not be too scary if younger kids happen to walk by and watch. I played the early prototype of the game with my daughter when she was only 11 years old, and she was really into this game for a while. I started to draw a few zombies and thought I was making a good job… until I showed her my sketches.
Dad, I don’t like them. They are too scary. I can’t stop thinking about what happened to them and who they were before.
This was a problem. As for myself, I have no problem with killing soulless monsters in games, but if these zombies had too many characteristics they would tell the story of how they died and who they were before. They had to be less realistic, and something that makes you feel like it really doesn’t matter what happens to them. Like they were toys!

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I settled for the blob-head style. My brothers were not too easy to convince, and still today I’m not sure if they would rather have a more serious style. But I’m pleased when I see my kids 10- 12 years playing the game and other kids hanging around, knowing that I have taken away the edge of the otherwise very serious and terrifying theme of zombies.

We hope that both young and old will enjoy this game!

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And now something for our Terraforming Mars fans:
Last week we showed you how to live in style on Venus. In order to live among the clouds though, you need fancy transportation between the floating structures:

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How to kill a zombie

Designer’s Note:

I have never been drawn to the zombie theme. I dislike gory images. And I never played a zombie game. But one day I thought: ‘I should make a zombie game.’

There is one thing I really like about the zombie theme, namely the idea of being assaulted from all sides by monsters without ranged weapons. So a zombie game is maybe not so far-fetched after all. Being a sucker for thematic games, I wanted the mechanics to reflect the increasing danger you face, but I also wanted to put in everything I know about zombie movies. The first thing that came to mind was:

Chainsaw

I’d like to point out that I’m not really all that illiterate about the zombie theme. I have watched a handful of zombie movies. So you can expect to encounter many familiar things in this game. My goal for this game is for the game mechanics to channel all these thematic details into a feeling of desperation. Zombies & Survivors is a kind of deckbuilding game, where only some of the things you find go into your deck, while others stay on the table. What is certain, is that zombies will enter your deck, too. Each time you reshuffle your deck, the zombie wave number increases, and that number tells you how many new zombie cards must be shuffled into the deck.

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Not only will you face more zombies, but they will also decrease the number of useful cards you draw. A chainsaw is really handy when meeting many zombies, but take care, because once you use up its gas, it takes time to find more and refill it (it has to go through the deck to come back again).

– Jacob Fryxelius

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Back after Essen

Hello friends,

We’re back home again after Essen Spiel. As usual, it takes at least a week before we’re back on track.
We are very happy about everyone who came and asked about Terraforming Mars. Even if some were disappointed to learn that the release is postponed until next year, it’s very encouraging for us that so many people out there seem to know about the game… Essen was fantastic! As usual. A lot of new contacts with publishers and distributors open up the doors for collaboration on game projects in the future. Don’t be surprised when you see the big logos on our coming games 🙂

Many familiar faces visited our booth again this year, but also lots of new ones. Thank you all for stopping by, grabbing our Swedish candy and our games. Wilderness is sold out, and many really missed it at the fair, but our table and time were filled with our other games, especially Fleets with the new expansion.

Just as last year, we had a beta-tester event, showing another upcoming game. The beta-testing of Terraforming Mars was a huge success, both for spreading the word and for streamlining the game, so now we want to give the same opportunity to – Zombies & Survivors!

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It is a cooperative card game, where  zombies invade your deck and you have to gear up to meet the threat. We really look forward to getting feedback on this, and have already enjoyed some of it. Once again, thank you all for supporting us!