Mission: Red Planet

In Mission: Red Planet the players play industrialists, racing to exploit the resources of Mars – the catch being that everyone starts on Earth, and during the game you mess with each other’s plans in a big way.

Everyone begins with their own set of astronauts and character cards that have a numeric value (1 to 9) and a special power for each card. Each player also gets missions that they keep secret from the other players. The board is placed centrally, showing Mars itself, broken up into regions that the players will scrabble over.

On each one of the ten rounds, everybody selects one card to play. Then someone counts down from nine to one – when your cards’ number is called, you flip it over and action the card. We won’t go into all the actions here, but basically it’s a variety of constructive things (for yourself) such as boarding a rocket, launching a rocket, moving some astronauts around Mars -or destructive ones (for the other players) such as destroying a ship, eliminating someone else’s astronaut, or even claiming one of their astronauts as your own.

Some character cards will also allow you to pick up an Event cards – Event cards will be one of three categories: some are mission cards (fulfilling a mission will get you extra points at the game’s end), some are action cards that you can use on a future turn, and some are discovery cards. The discovery cards can be placed adjacent to the various regions on the planet and affect them in a variety of ways – potentially undermining the player who believes themselves to be ‘winning’ in that region!

Playing the nine – your highest card – allows you to return all previously played cards into your hand. There are three scoring rounds where your presence on the planet dictates what points you get, and the game ends after the tenth and final round.