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:
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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!
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.
Jacob Fryxelius, designer of Terraforming Mars, reveals some of the easter eggs hidden in Terraforming Mars in this weekly article series.
CrediCor
Corporations are sometimes lead by eccentric CEOs, and this is true for CrediCor. This has the effect that CrediCor prioritizes big and spectacular projects!
The CrediCor logo is based on one of the many alchemic symbols for gold, which, suitably, is also similar to the symbol for Mars. It was only slightly altered to have ‘credits in the core’, and even more resembling an asteroid impact – a typical project for CrediCor.
CrediCor’s business activities can be seen in cards like Earth Office and Business Contacts… and they are of course your Allied Bank of choice if you play with PRELUDE (which you do, right?)
The CrediCor logo is based on one of many alchemic symbols for gold, which also resembles an asteroid impact, and also the symbol for Mars. Very suitable!
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!
Our first 3 publishing partners. NOTE: Rebel Games has since changed its logo.
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
The logo of Tharsis Republic corresponds to the 4 large volcanoes on Mars and their positions.
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?
References to Tharsis Republic on other cards.
With this update, we also want to wish you all a Happy Easter holiday! See you next week with more Easter Eggs 🙂
Jacob Fryxelius, designer of Terraforming Mars, reveals some of the easter eggs hidden in Terraforming Mars in this weekly article series.
When Isaac created the logos and artwork for Terraforming Mars, many small details were put in that may not be obvious to most people. There are references, cameos, corporation logos, logos from our printing partners, real landmarks, and more. Now that Easter is upon us, we want to give you a taste of this, so we will present some of them in this article series, starting with everything Ecoline.
We like small actors playing big roles, and Ecoline is one such example. It has a typical sea shell icon as its logo, and with an interesting note that it also symbolizes a flexible fuse in the field of electronics. These meanings combine to say that Ecoline engineers lifeforms to withstand the harsh environment on Mars.
The tag line ‘Evolving Your World’ just seemed appropriate.
Ecoline is one of the more featured corporations in the game art, and can be found on cards such as Grass, Earth Office, Zeppelins, Micro-Mills, and Soil Factory (and Lunar Exports and Venus Soils from the expansions).
The zeppelins carry their message, the grass is sown by them, and they already pop up on electrical fuses today.Spoiled with soils, Ecoline manages growth both on Mars and on Venus.
The picture from Grass, done by brother Daniel, was once suggested as part of the box cover art, but Isaac made a much more fitting art for the box. We’ll talk more about that next week.
Micro-Mills represents the first terraforming method employed in the Red Mars book series by Kim Stanley Robinson. Soil Factory includes 3 cameos, which are just as difficult to spot as the corporation logos, while Earth Office features 6 corporation logos, 2 of which are not released yet. Zeppelins has the tagline on its side, also fairly difficult to see. These things were done for our own entertainment, but also for anyone taking out the microscope to scrutinize our pictures. Isaac hid things even I didn’t know existed in the artwork… trying to keep some of the fun for himself!
As you can see, there are even more things to see than can actually be seen.
