Описание
In Ruins of Mars players are competing to build out their arsenal of knowledge. They must understand the languages of ancient civilizations that colonized Mars, making it a hub of economic activity. Though, the year is now 2179 and the Earth's future seems bleak. Earth's only hope is to learn the reasoning why Mars faced its demise as see if their technologies can be used to prevent further decay on Earth.
The game is played around a board with ten communal cards. Players will pick up any stack of cards and then place them down in a mancala like fashion (they must place a card on the space they picked the cards up from) and then they place other cards around the rest of the board. Each of the five locations on the board have different effects on the cards placed there.
In Ruins of Mars players are playing as explorers who are looking to decipher martian languages, learn and replicate their technologies, gain hourglasses necessary to perform certain abilities and ultimately gain prestige to win the game. Ruins of Mars uses a unique action selection mechanism in which the benefits of the action are derived from the action tiles which are placed below that site's action. The action tiles will shift around the board's actions each turn in a similar fashion to mancala.
Game Contents:
1 Planet board
4 Player boards
4 Tech boards
1 Oxygen cost track & 1 Language board
5 Character cards
48 Tech cards
12 Solo Tech cards
20 Language markers
4 Scoring markers
16 Resource markers
30 Radiation tokens
20 Hourglass tokens
11 Action tiles
16-sided Wasteland die
The goal of the game is to earn the most points, which is done by learning martian technologies, learning their languages and studying cards (studied cards have an additional bonus effect). Players can chose an action to study cards at one of the sites on the board instead of playing its ability and have ways to earn temporary focus tokens, which will allow them to spend a token for a one-time use bonus effect.
Each technology can be purchased with a mixture of three resource types, which are earned through certain cards on the board.
There are three levels of technologies to be learned and three rows in the tableau (for a total of 9 cards) the game ends when either someone fills out their tableau or when when three markers are at the top of the language learning board, which players advance on through the use of certain cards on the board.
