How to play On Mars

THAT’S IT. If anyone else says “are we there  yet?” i’m turning this space shuttle around!   Here’s how you play On Mars. You and your friends play lead astronauts on   a years-long mission to colonize the red planet.  You'll drive your rover and bots around Mars,   making discoveries and constructing buildings,  using resources and technologies that you grab   from an orbiting space station, as a space shuttle  taxis you back and forth.

Once the colony reaches   a certain level, or everyone's chipped away at  some public missions for improving life on Mars,   the game ends. Whoever's racked up  the most Opportunity Points across a   number of different categories... wins! (Wait - HOW long is this video…?) Here’s   the situation: On Mars is a big, heavy,  hairy game that takes a while to learn,   and a lot longer to play.

It IS rewarding if you  put in the time, but it's kind of like reading a   dime store novel vs tackling War and Peace. You  have to have patience and a passion for learning   to get anywhere with it. Let me teach you the  game in a way that makes the most sense to me.   This is a worker placement game, where you've got  a handful of workers, and the board has some spots   where you place them to take actions, but there  are a few unique twists here.

For startsies,   the board is split into two halves: the left side  of the board has spaces you can only access when   your astronaut figure is over here, orbiting  Mars at the space station, and the right side   of the board has some spaces that you can only  get at if your astronaut is over HERE, which   means you're walking around on the planet.

Let's take a close look at all this jazz at the   top of the board, because it's crucial  to understanding how the game flows.   These spaces are turn order spaces: your  astronaut starts in one of them, and each   round you rip through them in order, first through  the astronauts in orbit, and then through any   astronauts planetside.

After everyone's taken a  turn, the space shuttle moves along this track.   If it hits a red space, it travels to the other  side of the board, either from orbit to Mars,   or from Mars to orbit. If your astronaut is  on the side it's leaving from, you can catch a   ride to the other side of the board.

You get to  choose a new, available turn order spot - which   might get you a perk - and once everyone with the  option to travel has made their decision to stay   or go, you rip through everyone in turn order  again for another round. Wash, rinse, repeat.   Now, when the shuttle travels to the other  side, which of these spaces does it end up in?   Well, that depends on how advanced the colony on  Mars has become.

As you move through the game,   certain triggers will cause this colony marker to  move up, indicating that the colony has evolved   to level 2, level 3, and so on.vn So after  everyone takes a turn and the shuttle moves,   if it hits a red space, it flips to the opposite  side on whichever space matches the current   colony level.

Colony’s at level 1? Shuttle goes  here. Colony’s at level 2? Shuttle goes here.   Here's why that's important to  know: At the beginning of the game,   the colony is at level 1… and the shuttle  starts in one of these two red spaces.   So when everyone's first turn is finished,  because the shuttle is on a red space,   it'll flip to the opposite side of the board,  into the other red space.

Everyone takes a turn,   and the shuttle moves again, flipping to the  other side. Take turns, shuttle flips. And so   on. The shuttle makes regular trips, ping-ponging  between these two spaces, when the game is new.   As the game progresses and the colony becomes  more advanced, it's less reliant on that shuttle   to ferry supplies back from the orbital space  station.

So maybe the shuttle is here. Everyone   takes a turn, and the shuttle moves here, instead  of immediately travelling to the other side. Then   everyone takes another turn, and now the shuttle  is on the red space and flips to the other side.   But it flips to this distance space, and then  has to spend a few more turns reaching the red   space again.

So you get fewer opportunities  to catch the bus as the game progresses.   When you do decide to hop on the shuttle  and catch it to the other side of the board,   you take a couple of interim steps along the way.   If you're travelling from outer space to  the planet, you have to grab one of these   discovery tiles and put it on an empty space on  the planet's surface that's 3 hexes away from   your rover - everyone's rover symbolically begins  the game here on this central mine, but the game   doesn't actually have you put the rovers there  because there's a rule that every tile can only   hold one wooden piece.

So the tile goes on  an empty space 3 tiles away from your rover,   and if there’s no place to put it, it doesn’t  get placed. As you play, the planet fills up with   discovery tiles that you or your opponents can  grab later by driving your rovers over them.   Next, you get to reclaim any workers that are busy  doing stuff on the colony worker placement spaces.   These are workers you've assigned  earlier in the game.

Grab the workers,   and put them in your little living quarters. You  also get to reclaim any workers who are toiling   away on this space, your own personal little  work camp. Finally, choose one of these turn   order spaces to put your astronaut on. It has  to be unoccupied, and it might give you a perk.   Of course, the perks on these spaces get better  the later in turn order you decide to go.

  If you catch the shuttle in the opposite  direction, from the planet to orbit, then   any buildings on Mars that you've laid claim to by  upgrading them - we'll talk about how that happens   later - will cough up resources for you! Then  you get to free up any workers who are waiting   for you on the worker placement spaces aboard the  orbiting space station, and slide over the ones   who are in your work area.

Finally, as before,  you choose one of these empty turn order spaces   for your astronaut figure to occupy, and maybe get  a perk if there's one printed on that space.   So that's how that whole shebang operates, with  the shuttle ping-ponging back and forth across   the top of the board. It means that you're  gonna start on one side, drop some guys down,   and eventually catch the shuttle to the other  side...

but the guys you left over here in orbit   are unavailable to you on the colony side. They're  stranded there. And then you'll do some stuff,   maybe involving workers, over here, and eventually  catch the shuttle back to orbit. You'll get these   guys back, but then THESE guys will be stuck  on the planet until you return to free them up.   And on it goes, until the game ends.

How does the game end? Well, there are a couple   of ways. These three spots on the board hold  randomly-dealt public mission cards. These are   common goals everyone is working towards. Every  time you or an opponent chips away at one of these   missions, the cube moves down, and if it reaches  zero, this mission marker moves from 3 missions to   2 missions.

If all the missions get chipped down  to zero, the mission marker moves onto this second   row, triggering the end of the game. You finish  up the current round, and then do one more round   where everyone gets to take an action, and then  the game ends and you count up the scores along   these different scoring categories.

The shuttle  doesn’t travel anywhere in that final round.   Another way for game end to trigger is for you  and your opponents to build a big pile of stuff   on Mars, which raises the colony level, which  automatically decreases the number of missions   that have to finish in order for the game to  end.

Again, once the mission marker hits zero,   that triggers game end. “WORKER PLACEMENT”   i told you off the top that On  Mars is a worker placement game.   That’s a little misleading, because only  SOME of the spots on the board require   you to place a worker on them to use them. If a spot is just a circle with a little pink   X at the top, and it’s on the same side of the  board that your astronaut is on, then when you   take your turn, you can just point at that spot  and say “BUH,” and you get to do that thing.

  If the spot is on the same side of the board as  your astronaut, and it has a little pink space   dude above it, and spaces for dudes beside it,  that means you gotta take one of your available   workers from your living quarters and place it  on one of those spots to take the action.   If someone else’s guy is already there, you have  to pay a cost in order to place your own guy.   Count up the number of other players’  colours on the space - here it’s two colours,   so you pay twice, and here it’s one colour, even  though there are two actual guy pieces, so you   pay only once.

In this case, it’s only one colour,  but it’s your colour, so you don’t have to pay.   If you do have to pay, you can either pay in  Marsinium crystals, which are one of the game’s   currencies, or pay by moving one of your guys  from your living quarters into your working area,   which means he’s used up and won’t be available  to place on any spaces until you travel from   orbit to planet or planet to orbit, which frees  him up.

So dudes are kind of a currency too.   If you want to take an action and it’s full up,  you look at who has the majority of guys there,   and bounce them back to that player’s living  quarters. So here, green is hogging the space,   so all three guys get bounced and you don’t  have to pay anything to place.

Here, yellow   has the majority, so yellow gets bounced and you  don’t have to pay because the last remaining dude   is your colour. Here, purple has the majority, so  the purple guys get bounced and since 1 green guy   remains, you pay a crystal or slide over one  of your workers in order to place your guy.   Here, it’s a 3-way split, so all three guys  get returned and the space is all yours.

  It works a little differently in a 2-player  game: you pay based on how many dudes are   on the space, whether those dudes  are yours or the other player’s.   So placing someone here is gonna cost you 2. Some spots have little teal space dudes beneath   them, or a picture of a little crystal  falling into a hole.

i’ll explain what   those symbols mean later. ORBITAL ACTIONS   The resources in the game include  dudes and crystals, as we’ve seen,   along with minerals, batteries, water, plants, and  oxygen. All of those resources, except minerals,   are up for grabs in the warehouse on the  orbital station.

So if your astronaut is   in orbit on the left side of the board, you  can choose this action on your turn to take   a resource or a crystal from the warehouse and  put it in your supply. You only grab things from   the warehouse when you see this warehouse symbol -  otherwise, they come from the main game supply.

  There’s a limit to the resources you can  hold: you can carry one of everything,   and one more of everything for every shelter you  have on the board. At the beginning of the game,   you’ve got one shelter on the board, so  your resource limit is 2 in every category.   The cap on crystals is here - off the jump,  you can store 3 crystals on your board.   When you gain crystals, they go in this little  pit down here to remind you that you can’t use   them on the same turn you got them.

When your turn  begins, you move them up into these slots. If you   gain a crystal but your storage slots are full,  you lose the crystal. There’s a whole other system   that lets you move these ships out of the way to  store extra crystals that we’ll look at later.   One more note about resources: see the  multi-coloured border around the mineral icon?   That’s there to remind you that minerals  are wild, and can be used in place of the   life support resources - plants,  batteries, water, and oxygen.

  If you take this action, you can claim one of  these tech tiles. Tech tiles make different   actions in the game more robust and powerful. The  tech tiles on the bottom row are free to purchase.   These ones cost 1 battery, and these ones cost  a battery and any other non-crystal resource.   The tiles are dealt out here  randomly at the start of the game,   so it’s not to say that the more expensive ones  are necessarily better than the cheap ones.   I’m just going to flip them all over so you’re  not overwhelmed with confusing iconography.

  When you buy a tech tile, it goes on  this tech tree on your player board.   And any time you take this action on the orbit  side of the board - this is one of the actions   that costs dudes, by the way - you get to advance  your tech twice. That means moving one tile to   the right two spaces, or moving two tiles up  once each.

If you want to move a tile but the   next column is completely blocked, you can’t move  it. Moving tiles into new columns costs a certain   number of resources - a non-crystal resource  for column 2, oxygen for these two columns,   oxygen and a non-crystal resource  to advance tech into column 5,   and oxygen and a crystal to get a tile from  here into this final column.

When you advance   tiles into spaces with stuff printed on them,  you get that stuff. At the end of the game,   you’ll get an increasing number of points for  having tech tiles in different columns.   Off the top of the game, you’ll see that  the Martian colony is coming along nicely.   There’s a mine in the centre of the board,  along with four life support buildings:   a generator, a water extractor, a greenhouse,  and an oxygen condenser.

Each player also starts   with a shelter in their colour. These are  all basic, communal buildings, and you and   your opponents will be adding more communal  buildings to the board as the game goes on.   But apart from those shelters, nobody really owns  these buildings. If there were two generators on   the board, we couldn’t say that one belongs to the  blue player and one belongs to the purple player,   because… who knows?

There’s nothing identifying  them as belonging to one player or another.   But there is actually a way to  declare ownership of a building,   and that’s by collecting one of these blueprints  and using it to upgrade a communal building,   which lets you put a building marker of  your colour on it.

Now we can clearly see   that this power generator belongs to the blue  player. We call that an “advanced building.”   Upgrading a building does a couple of things  for you: first, it makes the building cough   up a resource for you whenever you travel from  the colony into orbit. So if you had an advanced   building here and here, and you travelled to  orbit, you’d get 1 water from the extractor,   and 1 crystal from the shelter.

Second, completing  a blueprint gets you an extra ability that you can   potentially use on your turn in addition to your  main action, which we’ll look at in a sec.   So taking this action on the orbit side is how  you claim blueprints. The space requires a dude,   and you get to pick any one of the face-up  blueprints and put it near your player board.   When you take a blueprint, you immediately take  the resource printed at the bottom of the card.   You also stick one of your buildings on it  to remind yourself that you haven’t actually   built it yet.

You’ve only got 8 building  tokens, so the maximum number of blueprints   you can claim during the game is 8. The last action available when you’re on   the orbital side of the board is this one, which  just lets you take an emergency landing pod down   to the planet’s surface. And that’s all you get to  do.

You might take this action if you absolutely   need to be on Mars for the next round, but it’s  gonna be a while before you can hitch a ride on   the shuttle. If you take this action and land on  Mars in a round when the shuttle is about to take   off from the surface and go back to orbit, you  absolutely can hitch a ride back with it at the   end of this round and do all that planet-to-orbit  stuff, including collecting resources from the   buildings you’ve upgraded.

CONSTRUCTING BUILDINGS   If the orbital side of the board is generally  where you gather the technology, blueprints,   and resources to do stuff, the planet  side of the board is generally where   you use those materials to do that stuff. These top two spots, which both require dudes,   are how you put new buildings on Mars,  and upgrade them using your blueprints.   Constructing and upgrading buildings are  the heart of the game, and they’re the   most complex action you can take.

Watch: If you wanted to construct a new building   on the planet, you’d put a dude on this space  following the rules we discussed earlier. The   buildings you can construct are all here, and  there’s a sort of offset shift to their prices:   you can spend minerals that are produced  in mines to pay for power generators,   batteries that the generators produce to build  water extractors, water from those extractors to   build greenhouses, plants from those greenhouses  to build oxygen condensers, oxygen from those   condensers to build new shelters from your player  board, and people who live in those shelters   are the resource you need to construct mines,  bringing the whole thing full circle.

Anyway,   pay the resource required, take the top tile from  the stack, and put it somewhere on the planet.   You’re limited as to where you can place the  tile by a few different factors. You have this   handy-dandy construction robot, and you can  only place your new building on the same space   as your bot, as long as that space doesn’t have  some other building on it.

Your bot also has a   construction range of 1 space, so you can put that  building anywhere within range - again, as long   as there isn’t already a building there. Now, when you place a building, it’s either   going to be standalone, or part of a complex  of two or more buildings of the same type.   Standalone.

Complex. Standalone. Complex.  Remember those tech tiles we talked about?   Those tiles decide whether the building you’re  placing has to be standalone, or whether you   can connect it to other matching buildings to  form a complex, or grow an existing complex.   First, you look around the table to see if anyone  has the tech tile matching the type of building   you’re trying to construct.

Aha - the green  player has the tech tile for oxygen condensers.   Then, count up the number of buildings you’re  trying to connect it to. If you put it here,   then you’re trying to create a complex by  connecting it to 1 other oxygen condenser.   If you dropped it in the middle of all these  buildings, then you’re trying to connect it to   3 other oxygen condensers.

The  level of the matching tech tile   has to be greater than or equal to the number  of buildings you’re trying to connect to.   So in this situation, it’s all cool because  you’re trying to connect to one other condenser,   and the green player has advanced that tech tile  to level 2.

1 is less than or equal to 2. But if   you were trying to do this, and connect to 3  other condensers, well… 3 is greater than 2.   The tech wouldn’t be advanced enough  to pull that off yet, so no dice.   If it’s no dice and the technology isn’t  advanced enough for you to build a complex,   you have to make the building standalone.

You do  that by counting two spaces away from a matching   building - and it still has to be in range of  your bot. So here, you could drop a greenhouse   in this space - it’s 2 tiles away from this  greenhouse, and it’s within range of your bot.   But if this was the board state, you can’t  construct a standalone greenhouse, because   the only legal spaces are outside of your bot’s  range.

You’re allowed to construct a building on   a space with a rover or bot on it, even if  it’s not your own rover or bot, and if you   build on a space with a crystal or discovery  tile on it, that treasure gets destroyed.   Speaking of crystals, when you first place the  tile, start with it face-down with the divot   at the bottom, because some tiles have arrows on  them telling you you have to put crystals on the   board in any empty space they point to.

Bots and  rovers can interact with those crystals later.   Then, flip the tile over, still making sure  the little dent is at the bottom of the tile.   You immediately get 1 resource of the  thing the building produces - in this case,   1 water - and if you form a complex, you get  1 resource for every building in the complex.   So if you did this, you’d  immediately get 3 plants.

  If you take this action, you can instead pay an  oxygen and build a shelter from your player board.   If you build that shelter next to someone else’s  shelter, you’re not forming a complex - that   shelter is considered a different type of building  for placement purposes. And everyone starts with   a free shelter tech tile at level 2, which means  you can connect one of your new shelters to 1 or 2   of your other shelters, right off the jump.  Take the shelters off your player board from   the bottom up.

Every shelter you build  increases your resource capacity by 1,   and it also frees up extra spaces for you to house  your dudes when they arrive on Mars later on,   which we’ll look at shortly. Building shelters  gets you free crystals instead of resources.   Mines are a little different than the other  building types, because you have to put a dude   on the build action to build one, and then put  ANOTHER dude from your living quarters on the mine   so he or she can start diggin’ up them minerals.  That means that if you don’t have a spare dude   to work the mine, you can’t build a mine.

If this is the first time that you, personally,   have either created or expanded a complex  of 2 or more buildings of a certain type,   well you’re making some nice progress, and  you deserve credit! Let’s say it’s the first   time you’ve made a generator complex. So you  take a progress cube from the corresponding   generator spot on your player board… and put  it over here at the bottom of the main board.   Note that there isn’t a progress  section for constructing shelters.

  Each progress cube you manage to place  here will get you points as the colony   becomes more and more advanced. And how  does the colony become more advanced?   Well, every time a new life support structure  - generator, water extractor, greenhouse,   or oxygen condenser - gets built on Mars, you  move the matching token up the track.

And if all   the tokens move past the colony’s current level,  they raise the ceiling and you move this token up.   So now, the colony is at level 2.  And a bunch of stuff happens.   But before we get into what happens, check this  out: the game begins with the colony at level 1,   and one of each of these four life support  buildings is already on Mars.

But the colony   wants to have 2 of each of these buildings. So  by constructing a new greenhouse, for example,   you’re helping to meet the colony’s  needs, so you get a few prizes: first,   you get 2 points. Sweet. That’s only for this  first row, though. Then, take the perk in the   same column as the building you just constructed  - so this one - and then take one of the perks in   this carousel of goodies over here.

The available  carousel perks are the same in every game,   but the column perks are dealt  out randomly at the beginning.   If you’re wondering how to even begin devising a  strategy for On Mars, here’s one place to look:   you can see that every time a water extractor  gets built, the player who built it gets points   for each shelter they’ve built on Mars.

So maybe  you think to yourself “Aha! Then i will build as   many shelters as i can first, and then build  water extractors, and rake in the points.”   The one hitch, though, is that if you build  something that pushes the matching token   beyond the needs of the colony, then you DON’T  get to collect any prizes.

(WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED   TO DO WITH ALL THESE STUPID GREENHOUSES??) So  it’s prudent to show a little restraint, and   build only when the time is right. As we’ve seen, the level of the colony   affects how the shuttle travels. When it reaches  level 2, the shuttle will start ping-ponging   between these spaces, which means it takes  off and lands less frequently, which means   it becomes trickier to plan out your moves and  catch the shuttle at the right moment.

At level 3,   the shuttle takes even longer, and at colony level  4, the shuttle stops moving altogether! And if you   and your busy beaver friends ever raise the colony  level to 5, you trigger the end of the game. The   shuttle travels one last time, regardless of  where it is on the track, either from orbit to   planet or planet to orbit, depending on which  side it starts on.

And then, it explodes.   Wait: if the shuttle stops running when the  colony reaches level 4, how do you travel   between Mars and outer space? Don’t worry.  There’s still a way! We’ll get there.   i mentioned that when the colony marker moves up,  a bunch of stuff happens. If you see this icon,   it means that everyone who has progress  cubes at the bottom of the board scores   1/2/4/7 or 11 points for having placed  1/2/3/4 or 5 progress cubes down here.   You get to place a progress cube every time you  make a complex of 2 or more buildings of each type   for your first time.

This icon means you don’t  score those progress cubes at this level.   If you see this icon, it means that you move  the mission marker one space to the right,   which means that fewer and fewer of these public  missions need to be completed by you and your   opponents in order to trigger the end of the game.  So colony progress accelerates the game clock.

  And whenever the colony marker moves up,  you always refill the tech tile display,   and refill all three rows in the warehouse. In  a 2 player game, there are no extra tech tiles,   so these spaces remain blank. And you only  replenish two rows in the warehouse.   And finally, the first time the colony marker  moves up, you scrap all the remaining blueprint   cards and deal out the next 12 cards from  the deck, which will include a mix of level 1   and level 3 blueprints.

Later, when the colony  moves up to the next level, you scrap all   remaining level 1 blueprints, and deal out the  last 6 cards, which are all level threes. Wanna   know the difference between level 1 and level 3  blueprints? Here’s how that whole thing works.   UPGRADING BUILDINGS   If you want to lay claim to a building by putting  one of your advanced building markers on it,   you have to grab a blueprint, usually by taking  this action on the orbital station side of the   board, and then you have to take this action on  the planet side, which is one of the ones that   requires a dude.

Then you pay one mineral token  and choose a building that matches the blueprint,   that’s also inside the building range of  your bot. Take your special building marker   off the blueprint, put it on the building, et  voila! Now you own that building, and it will   produce a matching resource for you whenever your  astronaut travels from Mars to outer space.

  Upgrading buildings also unlocks special  secondary actions called “executive   actions” which we’ll cover in a bit. If you upgrade a building that already has   another wood piece on it - can’t be someone else’s  advanced building marker, but maybe it’s a bot or   a rover belonging to you or another player - then  the rule is that every tile can only have 1 wood   piece on it, so that piece gets displaced to  the nearest space that doesn’t have wood on it…   and if there are multiple candidates, the player  who owns the displaced piece gets to choose.   If you bump a little dude off a mine, that  worker gets returned to its owning player’s   living quarters.

And by the way, if you ever run  into a situation where va dude comes back to you   but your living quarters are full, that dude goes  next to your board and is unavailable to you.   You gotta have enough space to house the worker  at the moment the worker comes home. So check   this out: the yellow player may be happily mining  away, but you could swoop in and upgrade the mine,   booting the worker off and claiming it as  your own with your advanced building marker,   which means that any minerals it produces in  the future are yours!

YOURS! MWA HA HA HAAA!   Since minerals can act as wild resources,  it’s very handy to control mines.   You can use level 1 blueprints to upgrade any  matching building within your bot’s construction   range, but level 3 blueprints can only be  used to upgrade a building in a complex of   3 or more matching buildings.

So this level 3  blueprint couldn’t upgrade this power generator,   because it’s only in a complex of 2 buildings. ROVERS AND BOTS   Each player starts with one bot  on the surface of the planet,   and one rover conceptually underground at the  central mine, ready to roll. If you take this   action on your turn when your astronaut is on the  colony side of the board, you get to move your   rover and bot around.

You can move your rover up  to 2 spaces, and your bot up to 2 spaces. Rovers   and bots can pass through spaces with other wood  pieces on them, but they can’t stop there.   Robots, as you know, live to destroy, so  any time they encounter a discovery tile   or a crystal on the planet’s surface, they’ll  wreck it, and it goes back to the game box.   Maybe you wanna do that deliberately to prevent  another player from getting that prize.

  Rovers, on the other hand, love exploring and  collecting. Your rover starts its journey at   the central mine, and spreads out from there. If  you run over a discovery tile or a crystal with   your rover, you get to collect it. The discovery  tiles give you some sort of immediate perk - it   depends on what the tile says.

As usual, any  crystals you collect go in your little crystal   pit until your next turn, when you move them up to  occupy these spaces, discarding any overflow.   There are also some tokens at the corners of the  board labeled A, B, C, and D that your rover can   go grab. You can grab one from each corner, but  you can’t collect two with the same letter on it.   All of these tiles do the same thing: they  let you research two times - move a tile twice   or move two tiles once each - ignoring  the costs at the top of your board.

  Along the side of your player board  are these spaceships ready to bring   new workers and/or robots to Mars. If you take  this action, you can pay a water and a plant,   and then pick one of these ships and move it into  your hangar. Then you get to choose whether you   want the ship to bring you two new workers, or one  worker and one new robot, which spawns on one of   your unoccupied shelters.

If all your shelters are  occupied, just pick the closest unoccupied space.   And again, if you gain a guy and your living  quarters are full up, you don’t get the guy.   The number of ships you’re allowed to welcome  to Mars is limited by the current colony level.   At level 1, you can welcome 1 ship.  With every level the colony goes up,   you can take that action and pay the plant and  water to welcome an additional ship.

And with   each ship you welcome, you’re freeing up a space  on your board to store more and more crystals.   Each ship in your hangar is worth  3 points at the end of the game.   But if you’re ever in a bind and you need to  travel to the orbital station or to the colony,   but the shuttle’s gonna take longer than you’re  willing to wait, you can discard a ship from   your hangar at the end of the round in order to  travel, like you’re travelling by private jet.

  EXECUTIVE ACTIONS   Now, choosing which ships to welcome to Mars  matters, because with each ship you welcome,   you unlock a space that gives you a new executive  action. Executive actions are like bonus actions.   You can take one executive action per turn, and  you can take it either before or after your main   action - the main action is the one that you  take using a circle spot on the main board.

  Executive actions cost a  certain number of crystals.   These three down here all cost two crystals, and  are available from the beginning of the game.   This one gives you 2 movement points to move your  bots around. This one lets you take something   from the warehouse, even if your astronaut’s  not on the outer space side of the board.   We’ll talk about this one momentarily.

Up here, if you’ve freed up this space by   welcoming this ship, you pay 4 crystals to  develop your tech tiles at no additional   cost - so you skip the column fee. Here, it’s  4 crystals to move your rover twice, 3 crystals   to take a blueprint, 3 crystals to upgrade a  building, and 3 crystals to get a mineral.

  Back down here, you take an executive action  to pay 2 crystals to use the ability on one of   your advanced buildings. So if you had  this greenhouse blueprint, and you had   taken the upgrade action and paid the mineral  to upgrade a greenhouse earlier in the game,   you could pay 2 crystals as an executive  action to use the advanced greenhouse’s action,   which lets you construct another greenhouse on  the board - following all the placement rules   we’ve discussed.

So executive actions are  a way to get two actions in a single turn,   when you’d normally only get one. And who’s  this little critter? Well that’s a scientist.   And once we figure scientists out, you’ll have  seen almost everything On Mars has to offer.   SCIENTISTS   The last action on the board lets you hire a  scientist.

It’s different than all the other   pink guy action spaces in that there’s one spot  reserved for each player. Incoming workers don’t   bump anybody out - your worker is stuck there  until you dislodge it - say, by travelling to   the orbital station and back again, or by using  a perk like this one that lets you free up a   worker from the board or your work area.

When you take the action, you get to hire a   scientist from this side board. There’s only one  scientist for each discipline in the whole game,   so it’s a bit of a race to get them. You  hire a scientist by paying the price below,   and then you take the scientist figure and the  card home with you to live next to your board.

  Now, when you take this bottommost executive  action before or after your main action,   then instead of paying 2 crystals to use  one of the actions on an advanced building,   you can place a matching scientist there  instead, and take an advanced building’s action.   The scientist hangs out on that advanced building  until you use that action again to move him or her   to a different advanced building that  matches the scientist’s specialty.

  But check this out: you can even play  your scientist on somebody else’s   advanced building! The drawback, though,  is that the owner of that advanced building   also gets to take the building’s  executive action on his or her turn,   and for free, because there’s already a  scientist working there.

And that player   gets to use that scientist-staffed building  potentially every turn as an executive action,   until you use this action to move that scientist  away to a different advanced building!   You can’t put a scientist on a  blueprint that hasn’t been built yet.   And make sure that the colour of the scientist  matches the colour of the building!

  Scientists can be worth a lot of points to you  at the end of the game. They get you 3 points   per matching advanced building on Mars, no matter  who owns the building. So if you have the blue   hydrologist on your payroll, that scientist  will reward you 3 points for every advanced   greenhouse on the board at the end of the game.  There are 6 advanced greenhouses on the board,   and it doesn’t matter who owns them: you get  18 points!

The Rules Gremlin wants to point out   that you’re not matching the scientist to the  building by colour to score it. It’s offset,   just like the tile prices: the blue scientist  gets you points for advanced greenhouses,   the green scientist gets you points for  advanced oxygen condensers, and so on.

  After you hire a scientist, you have to replace  it with an Earth contract card. You rifle through   the deck and choose which one you want to put  out. Maybe it’s something you’d like to buy   in the future to earn more points? But since  it’s public, any one of your opponents could   come along and snatch it from you.

You buy contracts the same way you hire   scientists: by taking this action and paying  the cost next to the card. Contracts all cost   1 crystal. If you buy a contract, you’re on the  hook for completing it. If you manage to complete   it by the end of the game, you get a certain  number of points, but if you don’t complete it,   you lose a certain number of points.

These contracts are all the same:   you get the points if you manage to have an  advanced building marker on a complex of 4   or more buildings of that type by the end of  the game. These dark blue ones are like banks:   you choose to put resources on them matching their  symbols. Those resources are trapped there for the   rest of the game - you can’t spend them - and at  game end, you’ve completed the contract if you’ve   banked the requisite number of resources.

A FEW MORE THINGS…   Well that’s most of it! There are just a few  more straggling rules that you need to know   about before you’re ready to enjoy On Mars. Remember how i mentioned that if you want to   create a complex of 2 or more  buildings of the same type,   you have to look around the table and make sure  someone owns the tech tile for that building type,   and that it’s at a level equal to or above  the number of tiles you’re connecting to?   Well, when you borrow someone  else’s technology like that,   the owner of that technology gets a perk.

The  owning player puts an oxygen token up here,   and at the end of your turn, that player  gets to decide whether to keep the oxygen,   or give it up in order to move the technology  tile you borrowed 1 space up for free. If the   tile is stuck and can’t go anywhere, the owning  player has to take the oxygen.

And of course,   if the player can’t carry any more oxygen,  the token goes to waste… so if your planning   is meticulous, you can borrow someone’s  technology and they won’t see a dime.   And the tech tiles don’t stop at building  complexes: this tile adds movement points to   your rover when you take the “move rover and bots”  action - so it’s 2 movement points plus whatever   number the tile is under, and yes, you can  borrow that technology if another player owns it.   This one lets you do multiple building  upgrades when you take the upgrade action.   And this one lets you take additional workers  whenever you welcome a ship into your hangar.   You get the boosted benefit if you use your  own tech tile, of course, but you don’t get   that oxygen/upgrade option - that only happens  if one player uses another player’s tech.

  You might have noticed these little teal  worker icons or crystals falling into a hole   beneath some of the action spaces. If a space has  one of those icons, that means you can slide extra   workers over to your work area, or pay crystals,  to boost the effect of the action you’re taking.   So for example, taking the warehouse action lets  you grab a single resource from the warehouse…   but for every worker you slide over, you  get to take an additional resource.

  The way it works with these executive actions  on advanced buildings is that for every little   dude you slide over, you can close a gap in  the technology in order to build a complex.   So let’s say your bot is here, and you want to put  this water extractor down here to make a complex   of 3 buildings.

Carl owns the water extractor  tech tile, but he hasn’t advanced it past level 1.   That means you can only connect to one  other water extractor to form a complex.   You could put the water extractor here, but  it’s out of your bot’s construction range.   Damn you, Carl! But if you use an executive  action and put your blue scientist on Jenny’s   advanced water extractor building, that action  is boostable, so you can slide a worker over to   make up that 1-tech shortfall.

Now with sufficient  technology and good old fashioned elbow grease,   you can place the tile and build your complex…  which lets you place your progress cube here and   move this token up, which gets you this perk and  one of these benefits, and so on and so forth.   Boosting the “welcome ship” action with  more workers lets you welcome more ships,   but you’re still limited by the colony level.  If you’re at colony level 2, you can only have   a total of 2 ships moved out of these spaces  the whole time the colony is at level 2.   And you can’t use the workers who just arrived by  ship to boost the action to welcome more ships.   Give them a second to take their boots  off.

They were in outer space. God.   If you boost the “move rover and bots” space  with crystals, you increase the number of   movement points you can apply to either your  rover or your bots. It’s either/or, not both.   So 2 plus the number of crystals you spend,  or 2 plus the number of crystals you spend.

  You kick off the game with three  private goal cards. So for example,   you can complete this one once  you have 3 ships in your hangar,   and you get to pick one of these two rewards.  You can only complete one private goal for the   whole game. Alternatively, you can spend these  private goal cards as if they were crystals.   You don’t cash them in for physical crystals  - you spend them as if they ARE crystals.   And if you’ve completed one private goal, you  can’t spend it as if it were a crystal.

  ENDGAME   At the beginning of the game, three random  public missions are dealt to the board.   Any time anyone does the thing on one of these  mission cards, you move the tracker cube down.   So for example, the tracker on this mission  moves any time someone claims a blueprint.   (The claimant gets a bonus crystal.)  If the tracker reaches zero,   you move the mission marker down one,  indicating there are only 2 missions remaining.   If you and your opponents cause all of  the mission trackers to reach zero, that   triggers endgame.

Endgame can also be triggered  as the colony marker moves up, because it starts   reducing the number of missions that need to  be completed before endgame is triggered.   When endgame is triggered, you  finish out the current round,   and then you play one more full round where  everyone gets one last turn.

The shuttle doesn’t   move at the end of that final round. Then, it’s  time to score. Move the mission tracker cube along   this stretch to help you count up the points. First, score points for the progress cubes again,   just like you did when the colony  marker moved up to levels 2 and 3.

  Next, you get 3 points for every  welcomed ship in your hangar.   Slide all your little dudes  back from your work area,   and then reclaim all of your workers from  whichever side of the board your astronaut is on.   Fill up your available living spaces from the  bottom up. Any overflow workers that you can’t   fit get kicked off the board.

You score the number  of points printed next to your topmost worker.   Then, collect points for the columns  each of your tech tiles ended up in.   Next, collect 3 points for every level  1 advanced building you constructed,   and 5 points for every level 3 advanced  building. Conversely, you lose 3 and 5   points respectively for every level 1 and level  3 blueprint you claimed but didn’t construct.

  After that, you look at the scientists you’ve  hired. Each one scores 3 points for each advanced   building on the board matching the output of  his or her specialty, no matter who owns the   building… so this white r&d engineer scores  3 points for this advanced water purifier.   Whoever hired this geologist will score 3  points for this advanced generator, this one,   and this one, for a total of 9 points.

And finally, gain or lose points for the   Earth contracts you collected, and  either did or didn’t complete.   The player with the most Space Jam points wins!  Tiebreakers are whoever has the most crystals,   and then whoever has the most advanced buildings,  and if you’re STILL tied, it’s whoever has   the most progress cubes down here.

If you’re  still tied after that, flip the table, because   what the hell? SETUP   To set up the game, lay out the  main board. Populate the warehouse.   In a 2 player game, you only use the first two  rows. Split the tech tiles by their two colours,   and randomly deal one set to the board.  Keep the other set handy - unless you’re in   a 2-player game, in which case, get rid of it.

Split the blueprints into level 1’s and level 3’s,   shuffle them up, and put the 1’s on  top of the 3’s. Deal out six 1’s.