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The Importance of Earth Connections

Terraforming Mars is very much about colonization, futuristic technologies and settings, but we also believe people will bring society into the solar system, and the Colonies expansion gives us another chance to include mundane ideas that nevertheless are bound to follow humanity wherever we go. For example, species that are introduced on Mars will be chosen for their usefulness, resulting in a different ecosystem than those on Earth. Some animals that are quite common here, like horses, will be rare on Mars, even exotic! So why not ship some exotic animals to Mars to show them off for money in a Zoo? Having good connections on Earth will allow you to use taxpayer money to fund this and other projects. Your increased influence might even be enough to appoint the Luna Governor, with the power to get you through all the red tape of shipping animals.

 

 

The Zoo is giving animals a new role on Terraforming Mars as cash-cows. This will give the player new ways to consider Earth cards which are usually best to play as early as possible. But now you’d like to get the Zoo out first, but that requires a couple of cities in play…

It also gives you a new interesting option for animal shipment cards such as Large Convoy: do you save them for late game animal points, or do you send them to the Zoo as soon as possible to enhance your engine?

One thing is for sure – corporate monkey business has never been so profitable!

 

Terraforming Mars app is live!

The PC version of Terraforming Mars is live on Steam now. We are very thrilled to be able to play the game with each other, even though we all live in different Swedish cities. In fact, we’ll start one right away. Cheers!

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Titanium, titanium, titanium

With a focus on trade and colonization of small worlds throughout the solar system, the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars naturally features some titanium-producing cards. Not only can titanium be used for lauching your trade fleet, it is also highly useful for building all space infrastructure. Triton is therefore sure to get attention when in play. Trade with it before the competition takes the bounty – or establish a colony to leech off of them even when they beat you to it!

Titanium can also be found on Saturn’s moon Titan, where your shuttles can lift it into orbit, or deliver it to various atmospheric projects.

But you don’t have to go that far though to find titanium. Suitable ship-building materials are found right here on Earth, but are just too expensive to get into orbit in larger quantities. Building a Space Elevator on Earth might change that, and even though some consider the challenges too great, the rewards are more than worth it. The whole of humanity will thank you!

Considerably cheaper, but less glorious, would be to mine the moon.

 

 

Making Lunar Mining efficient will require some Earth tags, but in our next update you’ll be happy to meet the man for the job: the Luna Governor…

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Hazeriders

In the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars, players can send their trade fleet to distant worlds and bring home valuable goods. The colonies of Titan specialize in producing floating infrastructure – floaters! So what are floaters used for? If you’re familiar with the Venus Next expansion, you’ll know that floaters are indispensible for colonizing the clouds there, making for excellent interaction between these expansions. But Colonies is also ripe with floater cards. Titan has a suitably dense atmosphere, but so do Jupiter and Saturn, and the Jupiter Floating Station is just begging for some help in its construction and expansion so that it can yield a good profit.

 

There’s just one catch – you need some serious technological advancement in order to colonize Jupiter itself, what with the strong radiation and violent storms (and no place to land). The best way to solve this issue is of course to develop Floater Technology, both supplying the know-how (science tag), and floaters if the Titan colonies are not available to do it!

Of course, these are just ways to get the Floating Station going, but it can just as well be used to support other floater projects in the outer solar system, such as the Jovian Lanterns. It is also one of the cheapest Jovian-tagged cards at only 9 M€, making it extra valuable in combination with one of the Jovian-scoring cards from the base game.

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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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Pre-releasing Prelude

Dear friends,

Prelude has arrived from the factory, and will begin to sell shortly. We have just enough time to pre-release it in the cities in Sweden where we live, THIS WEEKEND. So here comes some short information about the whereabouts of the pre-release events.

In Trelleborg, Enoch hosts the event at Seriecentrum (address Hedvägen 155). The event starts at 14:00 on Saturday, July 28th.

In Stockholm, Jacob hosts the event at Dragon’s Lair (Sveavägen) on Sunday at 14:00.

In Karlstad, Jonathan hosts the event at Karlstad University, House 12 at 15:00, also Sunday.

In Linköping, Daniel hosts the event in the Studiefrämjandet premises (address Platensgatan 25) on Monday at 18:00.

The events should be long enough for visitors to try the game with Prelude. We will have discounts for expansion packages and will also have the promo cards for sale.

Welcome!

Enoch

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More Competition

The upcoming Prelude expansion to Terraforming Mars gives the corporation a substantial starting boost, but it also comes with 5 brand new corporations to play! In the early days of Martian colonization, Point Luna had a perfect situation to leverage – the largest space port on Luna. By offering efficient resource relocation from Earth to Mars, they could partner up in a variety of terraforming projects. This is simulated by their ability to draw cards whenever they play an Earth tag. You may not have much control of what you draw, but the variety of cards you’ll be sure to get will offer many interesting opportunities for you. In order to do well, though, you’ll need to play multiple Earth projects. Many of them are the space events that Point Luna specializes on – shipping resources to Mars, using the titanium from their Lunar mining operations. 

POINTLUNA

Another early competitor is Robinson Industries. Being founded by early terraforming pioneers, Robinson Industries works with a variety of projects, and has a holistic view of the process, involving every aspect of the colonization. In the game, they have a really cool ability to reflect this: once per generation, you can pay 4 MegaCredits to increase your lowest production! This is a good deal for any resource, but really excellent for titanium and plants. As Robinson Industries, you can start off by increasing one of those, or energy or steel if that is needed more. You have great flexibility, but also have to use some strategy to maximize this ability in the long run…

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Then we have Arklight, a species preservation organization that offers much needed diversification of the emerging Martian ecosystem. With sponsors at their back (MC production), they gain a VP for every pair of animal or plant tags they play. But wait – that is not the Prelude icon on the side of the card! Oops, it seems we just spoiled a card from the upcoming Colonies expansion as well.

Oh well, you deserve it.

ARKLIGHT

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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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Next expansion: Prelude

The next expansion for Terraforming Mars is Prelude, scheduled for release summer 2018, with a pre-release at Origins.

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Prelude is a small expansion that lets you kickstart your terraforming! It focuses on the early stages of Mars colonization and tells the background story of the corporations. When choosing corporation and starting hand, each player also draws 4 Prelude cards, and chooses 2 of them to boost their corporation. The expansion opens up powerful starting combos and increases player asymmetry.