It's only 2 days until the release of Imperium: Horizons! And for our final civilisation spotlight we saved the weirdest until last, with the Martians...
This is our final spotlight for the civilisations in Horizons. We’ve saved the most unusual to last, this time it is the Martians, our second fictional nation (the other being the Cultists). Our inspiration for this deck’s lore drew from many sources: ancient alien conspiracy theories, John Carter of Mars, and even Assassin’s Creed. Before we go into some of the details we encourage you to look at the art closely, we’ve referenced other Imperium cards (and some ideas that didn’t quite make it into Imperium), all with a Martian twist. Will you recognize every returning character from the previous decks?
Thematically, the Martians are alien visitors who have two conflicting goals – dominate the earth as an Alien state, or throw off their technological advances and ‘Go Native’ to mix with the human population. Things are complicated by their main power source, the reactor, which is the last card in the Martian nation deck. Like the Arthurians and their Gwaith Camlan, getting to this last card is bad, causing a Reactor Explosion. Your choice is therefore to flip your state card to the Barbarian ‘Going Native’ by removing all your Progress (you start with a lot), or remain an Alien and end the game before you get through your nation deck. The downside of not Going Native is you do not get a chance to develop your powerful Barbarian developments. Yes, the Martians are a civilisation that runs backwards, starting as an Empire and progressing (or regressing) to a Barbarian, at which point you can develop. These Barbarian developments are very powerful, such as the Permanent Settlement.
The strange alien nature of the Martians does not stop here though. You have some powerful extraterrestrial Gadgets such as Crystal Skull, Cloning Vats, and Fracture of Time. You need to remove these from your deck or suffer negative points. Using these powerful tools gains you Progress as a cost, the very thing you are trying desperately to remove. Juggling the use and removal of your Gadgets is one of the many challenges of this deck. Some you can exile, and there is always Sharing Our Secrets to swap a Gadget with a market card. If you do that then these near-magical objects will be very enticing for the earthlings to take for themselves (who will gladly suffer the cost of gaining a Progress).
Like with the other high complexity decks in Imperium we recommend players carefully look through the cards before playing – the usual utility cards are implemented very differently. For example there is no Conquer card to get regions, rather there is a Flying Drone and of course a Landing Site to make it more effective. If you want to gain Population, you will need to use your Ancient Astronauts rather than Prosperity. Martians do not really understand the human concept of Glory, instead accessing Fame cards with a Glorious Uplifting.
We hope you have enjoyed these spotlight blogs and we hope you’ll enjoy exploring Imperium: Horizons when it lands in February!
Find all the other civilisation spotlights: the Japanese, Taíno, Mayans, Inuit, Magyars, Polynesians, Cultists, Abbasids, Guptas, Aksumites, Tang, Sassanids and Wagadou.
High res versions of all teased cards are available on the the game's
BoardGameGeek page under the images section.
Imperium: Horizons is out this week. Pre-order now.
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