![New Game Round-up: Terraform Mars, Run Through a Bank, and Smash Doors the Mighty Marvel Way](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/IFEtJXGtWqV6Vkd2HggilA__medium/img/8HtqxmhzAb3y4AC0qIb11bAnwoc=/fit-in/500x500/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic2893230.png)
Here's an overview of Terraforming Mars, which Stronghold Games hopes to debut at Gen Con 2016:
The players acquire unique project cards (from over two hundred different ones) by buying them to their hand. The projects (cards) can represent anything from introducing plant life or animals, hurling asteroids at the surface, building cities, to mining the moons of Jupiter and establish greenhouse gas industries to heat up the atmosphere. The cards can give you immediate bonuses, as well as increasing your production of different resources. Many cards also have requirements and they become playable when the temperature, oxygen, or ocean coverage increases enough. Buying cards is costly, so there is a balance between buying cards (3 megacredits per card) and actually playing them (which can cost anything between 0 to 41 megacredits, depending on the project). Standard Projects are always available to complement your cards.
Your basic income, as well as your basic score, is based on your Terraform Rating (starting at 20), which increases every time you raise one of the three global parameters. However, your income is complemented with your production, and you also get VPs from many other sources.
Each player keeps track of their production and resources on their player boards, and the game uses six types of resources: MegaCredits, Steel, Titanium, Plants, Energy, and Heat. On the game board, you compete for the best places for your city tiles, ocean tiles, and greenery tiles. You also compete for different Milestones and Awards worth many VPs. Each round is called a generation (guess why) and consists of the following phases:
1) Player order shifts clockwise.
2) Research phase: All players buy cards from four privately drawn.
3) Action phase: Players take turns doing 1-2 actions from these options: Playing a card, claiming a Milestone, funding an Award, using a Standard project, converting plant into greenery tiles (and raising oxygen), converting heat into a temperature raise, and using the action of a card in play. The turn continues around the table until all players pass.
4) Production phase: Players get resources according to their terraform rating and production parameters.
When the three global parameters (temperature, oxygen, ocean) have all reached their goal, the terraforming is complete, and the game ends after that generation. Count your Terraform Rating and other VPs to determine the winning corporation!
• Munchkin is a game brand that's been popping up in designs from a variety of publishers, whereas Marvel is a comics brand that's expanded into a huge movie universe and subsequently appeared in every product line in existence. Thus, Munchkin Marvel might have seemed inevitable, and publishers Steve Jackson Games and USAopoly have combined to make it happen, with this base game that features new monsters (villains), allies (heroes), and custom S.H.I.E.L.D. Identification Cards debuting in April 2016.
Two expansions for this base game — Munchkin Marvel 2: Mystic Mayhem and Munchkin Marvel 3: Cosmic Chaos, each of which contain ninety new Door and Treasure cards and a dozen new Dungeon cards — will be released in August and October, respectively.
• Funforge and Lookout Games have agreed to a partnership in which Funforge will release Isle of Skye, Grand Austria Hotel, Oh My Goods!, Trambahn, and the new editions of Agricola in French for distribution in all French-speaking countries. (For an overview of how Agricola is being re-released in 2016, head to this Feb. 10, 2016 BGG News post.)
• Jordi Gené and Gregorio Morales' Bauhaus, first released in 2013 by Edge Entertainment, is being reborn in Q2 2016 by Fantasy Flight Games as Android: Mainframe. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:
In the game, you and up to three opponents are elite cybercriminals known as runners who are competing for control of a vulnerable bank's various accounts. At the beginning of the game, you mark your arrival by the placement of your first access point. Then, each turn, you get to take a single action: establish another access point, execute a program, or pass. Your goal is to use the programs at your disposal to secure your access points so that they control as many of Titan's vulnerable accounts as possible.
Most of the generic programs write pathways between Titan's various nodes, allowing you to place a blue partition between the nodes on the board. Whenever your partitions seal off a section of the board containing only your access point or access points, they are "secured" and flipped face down. They are no longer vulnerable to your opponents' programs, and you will score the accounts they control at the end of the game.
Android: Mainframe differs from its predecessor Bauhaus in a number of ways, such as each player having a hand of cards and the game including six runners who each have five distinctive programs.