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.

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. 

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…

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.

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

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.

During this last fall, FryxGames and BoardGameGeek held a joint contest where BGG users could submit ideas for new corporations in Terraforming Mars. We had not anticipated that more than 300 entries would come in! After many considerations, 3 winners were selected and playtested in the BGG community. After some modifications and refinements, we are now able to present our final winning corporations!

We are very excited about these new additions to TM, which will be available through the BGG Store in late spring:
https://boardgamegeekstore.com/

FryxGames wishes everyone a Happy New year, with new content for Terraforming Mars! Somebody asked for presents and fireworks?

Image by Isaac Fryxelius

Image by Garett W. Kaida