The 2018 campaign of G4N started with a game of Mission Red Planet. The main mechanic of this game is worker placement with an action selection element. The twist being that the workers are placed on Rockets heading off to Mars, those rockets come into play with a destination location, but that just might not be where they land if they even manage to get off the launching pad. Turns out rocket science is hard.

There are three phases of production on Mars through out the game, and the player with the majority of workers at those locations gets the all resources when produced. These resources are one way for players to get victory points for the game. There are a total of 10 rounds in a game and the production of resources happens between rounds 5 and 6, 8 and 9, and right after round 10.

The other way to get points is by secret objective cards in the players hands, each player starts with one at the beginning of the game and can try to get another one. Or there is an overall global objective for having the most ice collected in the game.

We had 6 Knights trying to get the most out of Mars on this game night. It was well played by all and I think everyone enjoyed the game.

Final scores:

  Knight Score
1 Luke 38
2 Garrett 26
3 Colten 25*
4 Brett 25*
5 Scott 18
6 Eric 16

My personal objective for this game was to have the most astronauts on the moon Phobos by the end of the game. In those first 5 rounds of the game I tried to take 2 different rockets which were heading to Phobos from the launching pad. However, my pieces ended up landing on the red planet instead. Being that I didn’t get a single astronaut where I planned him to be I only managed to receive a single resource of one ice for one point in the first production phase.

When the second production phase came around I managed a three way tie on Phobos which was producing ice (this left two ice on the moon to be taken by the player leading after round 10). I also pick up two of the three point resources from a region on Mars. So, I had only 7 points and was way behind the leaders on points and only tied on my objective of most astronauts on Phobos.

Rounds 9 and 10 worked out great for me, as everyone else that was on Phobos jumped off the moon to protect areas that they wanted on the planet. Much to my surprise I got my objective completed and then a very strange occurrence happened that the area producing 3 point resources flipped to produce ice for 1 point a piece but in doing so gave me the global objective of most ice and 9 more points. So I jumped from 7 points to 38 points.

I really do like this game, but you are just kind of riding a bull when playing 6 players. You get only 1/6th of the input into the game state and while everyone has the same pool of cards, when and how they are played can have massive disproportionate impacts to the other players around the table. It is fun for sure and for a 90 minute game the amount of chaos is just fine with me. The theme is great and it looks great on the table.