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Starting today on March 1st, and ending May 30th, we will be adding a brand new Season Promo Card to each order from the web shop. Here it is: Bio Printing Facility!

First off, Prelude is now launched for the digital version! This long awaited expansion has finally landed, and lets players kickstart their engines and makes the game faster. Prelude is by far the most appreciated expansion for Terraforming Mars, and we’re thrilled to have it out there.

On another note, Brexit is soon final, and the coming week up until Thursday is the last week we’ll be able to send orders to the United Kingdom without adding heavy export costs to each order. So make sure to buy your Christmas gifts soon!

Talking about Christmas gifts, we’ve also added Gift Cards to our web shop. If you don’t know what to give, give a gift card and let them choose for themselves!

Lasly, we’re also preparing the next quarterly newsletter. Please consider subscribing if you want the latest news from FryxGames. Head on over to the subscription page now! 🙂

Our collaboration with Hexy Game Studio has reached the start of our first Kickstarter Campaign together. Our game Space Station sees its 2nd edition, and it is now called Star Scrappers: Orbital. We’ve streamlined the rules and the cards, and Hexy has made awesome new graphics for the game.

The Kickstarter Campaign is now live: (follow THIS link to see it).

We’re very happy for this collaboration, and hope the best for the campaign.

It is very exciting for us to announce that we’ve entered a cooperation with Aconyte Books to produce a book series based in the Terraforming Mars universe. The first book is planned for release next summer (2021), with more books coming later. Here is a link to their own press release:

Aconyte and FryxGames Press Release

What would you like to see in such novels? What aspects of Terraforming Mars would you like to read more about in a dramatic, zoomed-in setting?

We’ve finally received a new batch of the First Player Marker, which means that both the NUTZ Bundle and the Goodie Bag Bundle are back in stock. Happy shopping!

A. Big. Box. Check it out on Kickstarer the 16th of June!

You can already visit the page on Kickstarter and sign up for notifications on updates (visit it here).

FryxGames on Patreon

We’ve launched a Patreon page where you can sign up and join us behind the scenes to get sneak peeks etc. Right now, we’re revealing some new tiles coming in the Big Box to our patrons. We also have a special deal until June 30th that all new patrons get a 50% discount code on any 1 game, expansion, or accessory on our webshop. So we hope to see you there!

Cheers from the Fryxelius Brothers

Jacob Fryxelius, designer of Terraforming Mars, reveals some of the easter eggs hidden in Terraforming Mars in this weekly article series.

Starry backgrounds

Here’s another cool science fact about Terraforming Mars, and I leave it to Isaac to explain since he was the one who did it:

Thanks Jacob! When I first developed the design for the gameboard… I have to halt here to say that the development of the gameboard is a chapter of its own where I only came in at the end, building on my brothers prototypes… anyway, I put in some random stars for the background. But then I thought, why not have a real background? So I downloaded a space app, Celestia, and travelled to the future Mars, to around 2400, to find a correct and interesting background. So in the main game you can find Mars in the fishes constellation, with the connecting and important star Al Rescha named. I’ll leave any deeper meaning of choosing that star to you… After our first printrun I came across an astronomy book that pointed out that Al Rescha is actually a blue star, so I felt obliged to change that.

I used the same procedure for the Hellas & Elysium map, where I named one star on the map for reference, so it could be possible (if yet very hard) to figure out what stars you are looking at. Those larger stars on the maps are the ones that you can connect to constellations, but even the smaller ones are correctly placed.

Most of our publisher partners for Terraforming Mars have their logos somewhere in the artwork. Our first 3 partners Stronghold Games, Rebel Games and Schwerkraft Verlag are featured on the cards Corporate Stronghold, Hired Raiders, and Mass Converter. The cards seemed like obvious choices, but seeing their logos may not be as easy, even though Stronghold Games actually has its logo 3 times, and the face of its CEO Stephen Bounocore 3 times as well!

After the first year of success, more partners joined Terraforming Mars, and are in later printings featured on cards such as Colonizer Training Camp, Peroxide Power, Media Group, Artificial Photosynthesis, Dust Seals, Import Of Advanced GHG, Energy Saving, Invention Contest, and Medical Lab, just in the base game. Can you find them?

Jacob Fryxelius, designer of Terraforming Mars, reveals some of the easter eggs hidden in Terraforming Mars in this weekly article series.

Tharsis Republic

When creating factions for Terraforming Mars, I wanted most of them to be corporations, but not all. Tharsis Republic is the first democracy on Mars, centered in the Tharsis region, which covers most of the base game board (which we call the Tharsis map). Many of Mars’s most iconic features lie here: Valles Marineris with Noctis Labyrinthus, the triplet volcanos Arsia, Ascraeus, and Pavonis Mons, and the biggest peak in the whole solar system – Olympus Mons (just beyond the left horizon on the Tharsis board. These four massive volcanos are also the basis for the Tharsis Republic flag, with a simplified but correct configuration on a Martian surface.

Tharsis Republic is of course featured elsewhere in the artwork as well, most prominently on the box cover that we promised to talk about last week. Both astronauts have the Tharsis emblem on their shoulders.

Lets talk a little about the box before going back to Tharsis Republic. The box cover is framed with a real Martian map with the great canyon system Valles Marineris at the top. The frame style was chosen in conjunction with our decision to make this a future-optimistic game, and can even be reflected in the shape of the bar code on the back. On the side of the box is a TM emblem that was once a prototype box front, as seen in our first no-budget teaser video (here).

The panorama is a representation of the terraforming itself, with a barren, unterraformed Mars at the far left, being gradually colonized and terraformed towards the right until it is actually somewhat green and with birds in the sky. In the center of this process are the two human astronauts from Tharsis Republic, overseeing the process and helping it along. Some people think women are underrepresented in the game. What they don’t realize is that Isaac’s wife Lovisa posed for both of the box front astronauts. Women don’t have to have super-accentuated features, especially in a space suit.

Ok, back to Tharsis Republic, which is also featured on the card Power Supply Consortium (they need electricity for their cities, right?). It is also featured on Martian Rails, with its ‘Vote for MFR’ on the side of the train. MFR stands for Mars Free Republic, an early name for Tharsis Republic.

Martian Rails has another corporation on it as well. Can you spot it?

With this update, we also want to wish you all a Happy Easter holiday! See you next week with more Easter Eggs 🙂