Microteach: Mission Red Planet

What follows assumes

• you know Mission: Red Planet,
• what a microteach is,
• the game is already set up on the table,
• you have all the resource tokens on Mars and Phobos flipped face up (enhance, simplify), and
• the global mission (Ice Monopoly) and event cards are stashed out of view (simplify).

Microteach

The object is to get the most points. (Pool some point tokens in front of yourself.) You get points (pick up and drop a few of the tokens in front of yourself) by fighting to control regions on Mars and Phobos (point out the regions).

There are ten rounds to the game. (Hold up the tracker and point to the numbers 1 through 10.) There is a scoring intermission following rounds 5, 8, and 10. (Point out the 3 scoring intermissions on the tracker.) In each round players select character cards from their hands (fan out a hand).

This character card (pick one) provides you with the means of getting your astronauts loaded to rocket ships. (Demonstrate by loading a single astronaut to two different ships. Don’t worry that the loading matches the card chosen.) When a ship is fully loaded it launches and men are landed at the corresponding zones of Mars. (Draw the correlation between the labelled rockets and the labelled zones on the planet. Then fill and launch the ships with various colored astronauts before transferring them to the planet.)

Between certain rounds a scoring takes place. The first production round produces 1 point token (start by dropping 1 point tokens into each of the zones where you placed astronauts), the second 2 (start dropping 2), the third 3 (start dropping 3). (Show the 1, 2, 3 dots on the tracker. Then correlate the point values of the different resources to the different values on the tokens.) The player with the most astronauts in a zone gets all the tokens (pick up an astronaut from the zone where a clear lead is shown and place the tokens in front of that player). If there’s a tie, the tokens are shared as evenly as they can be (demo this, ensuring at least 1 leftover). Leftovers remain until the next scoring.

After the 10th round, whoever has amassed the most points (pick up and drop the tokens in front of yourself, again) wins!

In accordance with Rule #1, it connects

• the means (loading and launching astronauts to zones on Mars and Phobos) and
• the ends (winning points tokens during scoring rounds).

Glaring omissions

• That characters are chosen secretly, simultaneously.
• That characters are revealed counting down from 9 to 1.
• That characters cannot be reused unless the played pile is first reclaimed.
• That ships launch and land in separate phases.
• That there are also mission cards, discovery cards, and event cards.
• That astronauts can move between zones.
• That resource tokens start face down and are later revealed.
• That event cards add facets for manipulating the game state and scoring.

Commentary

Flipping up the resource counters makes it easier to identify the three valuations (showing the respective point tokens) and point out that some zones are worth as much as three times more than others (enhance).

When scoring got demoed, 1 then 2 then 3 point tokens got dropped (simplify) making the seeding to the planet a munge of three rounds. Since the aim is to simplify and hit the 2-minute mark, these inaccuracies serve and expedite the explanation. They’re not difficult for the listener to make sense of.

Although characters are central to strategy and tactics, not a one was explained. Rather, they’re used as generic props for placing astronauts on ships (simplify). It’d be useful to explain one as the explanation develops, but it would be reasonable to defer explaining the brunt until the near end of the explanation.

Unlike Puerto Rico’s roles, which are central to getting anything done, the character cards are different flavors of the same key action. That makes one a higher priority and deserving of demoing in an earlier layer than the other.