Mars

Built on the core of the award-winning Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet pits players against the hostile Martian environment and a whole host of new adventures and challenges. The immersion experience is further enhanced with an integrated app that maintains the balance and challenge throughout. Players have the option of taking on the design as a series of separate games, in a custom campaign mode in which each successive game builds on the last.

The year is 1888, and Steampunk technology has advanced at a prodigious rate! Probes have been sent to Mars, and soon astronauts will be manning rockets in order to mine the planet for newly discovered resources. The first is a brand new element, Celerium, that could prove to be a combustible energy source the likes man has never seen. The second is Sylvanite, an incredibly dense material unlike anything found on earth. In addition to these resources, glaciers have been discovered on the planet. Whoever controls these icy masses could work to create a livable atmosphere on Mars

In Mission: Red Planet, players work as mining companies compete to send astronauts to Mars in order to colonize and mine for recently discovered materials. Over the course of 10 rounds, players play one of their special agents every round to help fill the rockets heading to Mars with their own astronauts while simultaneously working to prevent their opponents from doing the same. Once landed, these astronauts must gather to control specific regions of the planet, each yielding one of the three resources: Celerium, Sylvanite, or Ice. After rounds 5 and 8, players gain score tokens for every region where they control the majority of the astronauts. At the end of the game, players score one final time, adding any bonuses received from Discovery Cards and Bonus Cards. The player with the most score tokens at the end controls Mars, and all the riches it can bring!

From Bruno Faidutti's website:

This one, designed with Bruno Cathala, started with the theme. We wanted to make a game about colonizing Mars, with shuttles leaving the blue planet towards the red one. The theme is strong, and well caught in the steampunk graphic style decided by Asmodée. In Mission: Red Planet, each player plays a colonial power which sends astronauts, in space shuttles, to occupy the most promising zones on the planet. For scholars, the systems merge a majority game, à la El Grande or San Marco, with a character/action card system, somewhere between Citadels and Hoity Toity/Adel Verpflichtet. Nothing really new here, but there was much work on it and we're really proud of the result.

Welcome, dear Imperialists. It's the year 2415. The interplanetary federation (IPF) has done a great job in the last centuries. All necessary precautions have been taken to conquer this planet named "Steam". The core of the planet consists of a 6,500º Celsius hot source containing different resources, including water. It has taken over one hundred years to complete the first block of 42 shafts from the surface to the core.

But now the time has come. From every shaft surges the hot steam that is the basis of the production of raw materials. To be able to use and process this steam, platforms have to be placed over the shafts. Later, we can use the platforms to connect the water purification tanks. By using several tank extractors, we can harvest other resources like energy, ore, and quartz from the steam. These resources are important. You will need them to grow your steam empires. You will need to increase the capacity of your landing craft to transport your harvested materials off planet. Buy and sell the resources at the Trading terminal for profit, as currency is – like on earth – always in short supply on Steam. To help you in your endeavours, the IPF has placed several specialists at your command – but getting the specialist that you require may not be easy.

Planet Steam is a board game in which two to five players take the roles of entrepreneurs in a steampunk boomtown, racing to assemble equipment, claim plots of land, extract resources, and accumulate riches. After harvesting resources using tanks and converters, players must buy and sell those resources in a volatile and ever-shifting market. The one who earns the most income will, in the end, be victorious. However, only through shrewd resource management and clever manipulation of supply and demand can a player reign supreme!