Colonies Arrive for Terraforming Mars, While Lehmann Races to New Frontiers

Colonies Arrive for Terraforming Mars, While Lehmann Races to New Frontiers
Board Game: Terraforming Mars: Colonies
Stronghold Games already plans to debut Terraforming Mars: Prelude at Gen Con 2018 in August, but if you want to raise your eyes a little further from the horizon, you can look forward to seeing Terraforming Mars: Colonies in October 2018. Here's an overview:

Quote:
Our world has widened before us. Corporations expand their operations to all corners of the solar system in pursuit of minerals and resources. Most places are not suited for terraforming, but building colonies may greatly improve your income and your possibilities in achieving that higher goal — the terraforming of Mars. Send your trade fleet to distant moons! Colonize the clouds of Jupiter! And let your Earth assets propel you to success!
This expansion, credited to Jacob and Jonathan Fryxelius, can be used with only the TM base game or with any combination of expansions. It contains five new corporation cards, and you can shuffle them together with other corporations or you can give a colony corporation and a random corp to each player to let them choose who they want to be.

During set-up, you place 5-7 colony tiles in play from the eleven included in the expansion. On a turn, in addition to any of the other actions, you can spend 17 M€ to build on a colony and take its particular bonus, with only three players being able to do so, or you can spend 9 M€ (or three energy or titanium) to move your trade fleet to a colony tile and take the trade income posted there, with each owner of a colony on that tile receiving a colony bonus.

The expansion also includes 49 project cards to be shuffled with those in the base game.


Board Game: Terraforming Mars: Colonies


Board Game: Race for the Galaxy
• In March 2018, designer Tom Lehmann gave a talk at the 2018 Game Developers Conference on how to design a strategic card game, using Race for the Galaxy for reference. During that hour-long talk, he threw out a couple of references to New Frontiers, which at least in the images shown during that talk is subtitled "The Race for the Galaxy Board Game".

Now Lehmann has dropped an introductory teaser for New Frontiers on BGG, along with a picture showing prototype worlds, developments, and empire mat, along with production quality goods and colonists. An excerpt of the game description in that thread:

Quote:
New Frontiers, designed with Andreas Seyfarth's permission, takes Race for the Galaxy back to one of its inspirations, Puerto Rico.

In New Frontiers, players build galactic empires by selecting, in turn, an action that everyone may do, with only the selecting player gaining that action's bonus.

One group of 8 developments are always in play, giving the game its core structure. For your first game, the other developments have "preset" sides. In later games, which of the other 8 two-sided "small" developments and 8 two-sided "large" 9-cost developments will be in play is randomly determined during setup for that game. This provides variety from game to game, while allowing players to make strategic plans based on the developments in play at the start of each specific game.
From gallery of W Eric Martin

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