Micro Martians

The year is 2054. The first wave of human settlers is heading to Mars, accompanied by a fleet of autonomous supply ships, when disaster strikes! Threatened by a rogue asteroid, the fleet is forced to take evasive action, scattering their supplies across the Martian landscape.

You must venture into the wasteland to collect resources and repair the systems your colony needs to survive. When enough repairs have been made to ensure the colony’s success, the game ends, and the player that has provided the most benefit overall will be declared the winner.

Gameplay Overview:

Players take turns scavenging resources or repairing modules. When the last module has been repaired, players score points based on the number of different symbols in their arm of the colony. The player with the most points wins!

Setup:

Shake up the tiles and scatter them on the playing surface within reach of all players, forming the landscape. Arrange the tiles in a loose circle around the Hab—the large central hub of the colony—while making sure that no tiles are overlapping each other.

Each player chooses a representative color, corresponding to the arm of the Hab they will build off of during the game: Purple, Gold, or Cyan.

Purple goes first!

Turn structure:

On your turn, you must scavenge a resource, or repair a module.

• Scavenge a Resource: Take a resource tile from the landscape and place it in front of you. Resource tiles show a single resource symbol, with the exception of the Rover, which can be spent as one of two depicted resources.

• Repair a Module: Spend resources to take a module and add it to the colony. Modules show 1-3 small cost symbols and a large hexagonal scoring symbol. First, pay the module’s cost by flipping over matching resources you have previously gathered, returning them to the landscape. Then, attach the module to your arm of the colony; the concave hatch on the module being built should connect to a convex hatch on a previous tile (or the Hab, if it’s your first module.)

• Special discount: Attaching to a module with a scoring symbol counts as one free resource of that type toward the cost of the module being repaired.

• Special modules: “∞” modules grant all players a special discount in one specific resource.

The game ends when a player can neither take a resource nor repair a module. Players tally their scores by counting up the hexagonal scoring symbols connected to their arm of the hub:

• 1 point per different type of symbol connected to your arm

• 1 point per category of symbol of which you have the most in (ties do not count)

• 1 point if you have the most unspent resources remaining

The player with the most points wins!

Advanced rules:

• Sharing: You may use 1 resource from an opponent when repairing a module. If you do, attach the module between your arm of the colony and theirs; its scoring symbols count for both of you.

• Micro Martians can be played as a solitaire or cooperative puzzle! In this mode, play using the normal rules, with the goal of having no Modules left over at the end of the game.