On Mars

On Mars involves setting up a central board divided into orbital and surface areas, complete with hex grids for Mars exploration. Players receive personal boards featuring resource tracks, worker supply (colonists), rovers, bots, and shuttle indicators. Blueprints, tech tiles, advanced buildings, earth contracts, and mission cards are laid out in their designated supply areas, creating a fully populated planetary and orbital ecosystem.

Players act as chief astronauts developing self-sustaining Martian colonies. The goal is to build, upgrade, and interconnect essential life-support buildings (power, water, greenhouses, oxygen), deploy rovers and bots, acquire advanced tech, and fulfill contracts to accumulate the highest victory point total by game end.

Gameplay revolves around alternating turns across colonization rounds split into colonization and shuttle phases. On a turn, a player performs one main action on either the space station (orbital side) or the Mars surface (colony side), utilizing workers and paying resource costs. Players can also execute bonus actions using crystals or specific worker/scientist abilities before or after their main action.

Scoring happens throughout and at the end of the game. Players earn points by advancing on the Life Support System (LSS) track, owning high-level shelters and advanced buildings, completing private goal cards, employing scientists, ranking up space station tracks, and fulfilling Earth contracts.

The game end is triggered when the mission marker on the LSS track reaches zero. After the current round finishes, one final round is played (omitting the shuttle phase), followed by comprehensive end-game scoring to determine the winning corporation.