This month’s game is Mission Red Planet by Fantasy Flight Games. The game is a turn-based game to control Mars or the Red Planet through colonization. The game can have up to six players but does work well with less. There are plastic pieces with the game, but it isn’t a game of pretty miniatures, like Rising Sun. MRP has a Victorian Steam Punk feel to it in with the artwork, which is in shades of red, also emphasizing the ‘Martian’ feel to the game.
The set up MRP consists of putting the planet together and randomly placing resource tokens on the planet, which has been sectioned into nine parts. The moon Phobos is also available for colonization. There is second satellite labeled Space Memorial, which is where the dead astronauts end up, more on that later.
The resources available are ice, Sylvanite and Celerium, which are worth different victory points. There are two times in the game where you can gather the resources for victory points.
Each player is dealt a mission card, the instructions on are dealt with at the end of the game. They also chose the color of their colonists and set up the space ships to get colonists to Mars.
There are also a number of ships, labeled with the name of the part of Mars it is headed to. There are some ships with no labels and the first colonist on board gets to choose its destination. These space ships have limited room, as shown on their number. When the space ship is full, it can launch to Mars. It may take more than one turn to launch a space ship. Until it is launched, the ship or the colonists on it can be sabotaged or killed. All killed colonists go to Space Memorial satellite. This is important, because there is one mission card where a player can get points from the number of colonists on the satellite.
The game is played in 10 turns, which production breaks in between some turns, kept track with the ornate tracker. While game play is simultaneous, the tracker is passed around to different players, depending on who went last.
There are nine character cards, all which have different abilities, from hijacking one of the space ships to replacing other players’ colonists with one of their own. These characters also have values, labeled one to nine.
Each round consists of the players choosing which character they want to play that round. Each character can only be played once and then discarded. There is one character, the “Recruiter”. The player with the tracker begins to call out character numbers, starting with nine and working their way down to one. The higher value characters can move first that round, but might be stymied by another player who acts after them. For example, if you chose the low numbered Travel Agent, who can put three colonists ion a space ship, her effect might be neutralized by the fact all the other players went before you took all the slots in the space ships.
Game strategy is a combination of choosing which character to play that round, ability of the character you’ve played versus another character who can sabotage your strategy. Or the simple, but annoying issue of running out of room on the space ships before you played. The second thing to look out for is where you place your colonists. Certain discoveries will give you points for which state your colonists are. Also, if you have the majority of colonists in an area, you will control the resources there. Resources which give you points.
The game play is fairly simple, but there are a lot of layers to the game which come at the end and will affect the points needed to win, at that time the game’s missions and discoveries handed out in the beginning come into play. There are a number of different ‘discoveries’, like the one I had this game, which gave ever player in certain zone on Mars points, because lichen was discovered there.
There is a final discovery card, Ice Monopoly Mission. The player with the most ice tokens will get this and add nine victory points to their total.
About Felicitas:
Felicitas is a frazzled help-desk tech at a university in Boston who wishes people wouldn’t argue with her when she’s troubleshooting what’s wrong with their computer. She lives with three cats who wish she would pay more attention to them, and not sit at a computer pounding on the keyboard. They get back at her by hogging most of the bed at night and demanding her attention during the rare times she watches TV or movies. She’s protected by her guardian stuffed Minotaur, Angenor, who was given to her by her husband, Mark. Angenor travels everywhere with her, because Felicitas’s family doesn’t think she should travel by her lonesome. They worry she gets distracted and lost too easily. Felicitas doesn’t think of it a getting lost, more like having an adventure with a frustrated GPS.
Felicitas knits and hoards yarn, firmly believing the one with the most yarn wins. She also is sitting on hordes of books, which still threaten to take over her house, even with e-books. Between writing and knitting, she brews beer, wine, mead, and flavored liqueurs. Felicitas also bakes, making cakes whenever she needs to work out an issue in her novels. Sometimes this leads to a lot of cakes. Her coworkers appreciate them, though, with the student workers buzzing about on a sugar high most of the time.
Felicitas writes urban fantasy, steampunk, and horror of a Lovecraftian nature, with monsters beyond space and time that think that humans are the tastiest things in the multiverse. Occasionally there’s a romance or two involved in her writing, with a happily-ever-after.
Website: www.felicitasivey.com
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Twitter: @felicitasivey
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