Terraforming Mars: A new life in the off-world colonies

Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynarth and Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter and saw the horror on one of the satellites, and gazed at the Cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars’ ruddy disc.

- H.P. Lovecraft: Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Back in 2019, we had the distinct pleasure of being introduced to one of the best board games in the world: Terraforming Mars. We also tried the Prelude expansion, which we quite liked and would recommend. Back then, though, table space limited our experiments with other expansions. We did get to try the double-sided Hellas and Elysium board, which I'd also recommend, but now that we've moved and have a larger table, it was time to try some more stuff. And then, of course, the pandemic happened, meaning an enforced break from board games. But we did eventually get around to trying out a couple more expansions!

Venus Next

First up, Venus. This expansion adds a small Venus board, a new award and milestone, and some new corporations and project cards, which mostly center on terraforming Venus. A couple of the cards can just be added to the base game, but most of the Venus cards focus on an unfortunately named new resource type: floaters. Basically, terraforming Venus is just like terraforming Mars, but instead of three different variables, there's just an overall terraforming percentage. You can invest resources into increasing it, which gets you terraform rating but isn't necessary to finish the game.

Here's the setup for our first game with Venus Next; you can see the Venus board near the top of the image.

We didn't use the "solar phase" rule that speeds up the game, and even with one player who was new to the game, we spent a little over four hours, which is pretty much the same as our average non-Venus game. Also, now that our board game collection is more easily accessible, we finally got to use some proper counters for the Security Fleet card.

All in all, Venus Next is perhaps a surprisingly anodyne expansion. It doesn't detract from the base game or make it particularly longer; you can pretty much just ignore it if you're not doing anything with floaters or Venus tags. But it doesn't really add much to the game either. Nobody in our gaming group actively disliked it, and now that I own it, I'm probably going to set it up with the base game in the future; but I think most of us wouldn't actually bother with buying it.

So I don't know; if you feel like you might like a Venus expansion to Terraforming Mars, it won't hurt the game, but to be honest I think I'd be fine without it.

**

Colonies

Much later, we were able to try Colonies. 

Colonies adds a whole bunch of, well, space colonies. Each player gets a trade fleet, which they can send to trade with the colonies for resources. Resources pile uo in the colonies over time, and reset when a trade fleet arrives. You can also establish colonies of your own, which means you get a cut whenever someone else trades there. Here's the colonies in our game, right above the Venus board.

Colonies adds additional complexity but provides extra resources, and again the two seem to even out pretty well in terms of game length. Most of our table liked it, but I have to be honest: I didn't.

The colonies make a difference to the whole game, because they can substantially accelerate your resource production. Whereas you can pretty much ignore the Venus board, as we did in our game, you ignore the colonies at your peril. I think this is a bad thing, because Colonies detracts from the attractive simplicity of Terraforming Mars, especially in the early game.

It also wreaks havoc with the theme; whereas without it, you can still have the feeling of a sort of bare-bones start on a barely inhabited planet, with Colonies your first moves include sending your interplanetary trading fleet to Titan or whatever.

So I think that both thematically and through the added complexity, Colonies actually detracts from the base game. I wouldn't recommend it.

Colonies also comes with a lot of cards that you can use with the base game, and with Venus Next as well, so even if, like me, you end up not liking the colonies, there's still something here for you.

**

There's one more expansion left that we haven't tried: Turmoil. It brings party politics to Terraforming Mars in the form of a council, and to be honest, no-one in our gaming group is really interested in it. So I think that means we've arrived at our Terraforming Mars setup: corporate era, Prelude, optional Venus Next.

Finally, I just want to repeat myself: Terraforming Mars is probably the best board game I have ever played. If you've never tried it, do.

Let's Paint Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness

Into the Abyss I'll fall, the Eye of Horus

Into the eyes of the night, watching me go

Green is the cat's eye that glows

In this Temple

Enter the risen Osiris

Risen again

 - Iron Maiden, Powerslave

Yes, I have succumbed to big box madness and bought the new Horus Heresy starter set.

**

It's a big old box, and the templates particularly warm my heart.

And so does the scatter die.

The rulebook is nice and chonky too.

However, I have two complaints. First, the art is a little too standardized for my taste; a 21st century John Blanche would never get hired by Games Workshop. And secondly, there's this.

Let's be very clear about what's going on here. Printing something like this in a rulebook published in 2022 is an overtly political act, whether the people doing it realize it or not. In the States and the UK, the right is fomenting a huge moral panic over trans rights, with the help of a multimillionaire children's book author turned hatemongering bigot. In this day and age, talking about "biological males" lands you squarely in the middle of a reactionary hate campaign, and on the same side as some of the most horrible people possible. I cannot understand why anyone would print anything like that in a wargame rulebook. Only last year, Games Workshop had to distance themselves from what they referred to as "real-world hate groups". This is a step in the opposite direction.

Which is to say nothing about the specific question of female Space Marines. GW themselves used to produce female Space Marine models, but in shall we say the particular environment of 1980s wargaming, they were unpopular and were discontinued. Since then, there have been occasional mentions in the fluff that Marines are all men, which has lately been at odds with GW's attempts to be more inclusive. For whatever reason, this issue has become a rallying cry for bigots in the hobby, who are somehow threatened by the idea that someone else's space soldier toys might be girls. They cry "retcon" at it because they don't actually know anything about the hobby they imagine they're defending. If there's something we've learned in the third millenium, it's that some people have unbelievably fragile masculinities.

For Games Workshop to include this abjectly silly "biological male" nonsense in the Horus Heresy rulebook is throwing red meat to these bigots, who will be encouraged by this to terrorize women and other less privileged hobbyists online. Again, doing this is exactly the opposite of "Warhammer is for everyone" - and during Pride month at that! It's absolutely deplorable.

I am deeply disappointed in Games Workshop for doing this. There's no reason that sentence needs to exist. It will hurt vulnerable people and encourage the worst bigots in the hobby. Whether they realize it or not doesn't matter, because the effect is the same. I also have to say that the repeated references to "pure bloodlines" and "tainted gene-seed" and so on made for deeply uneasy reading in 2022, especially after the "biological male" nonsense.

So I don't know, maybe one really simple reason that Warhammer has a Nazi problem is that Games Workshop is perfectly happy to dogwhistle to them every now and again.

**

As for the box, Age of Darkness indeed, we split it three ways. I already made a Contemptor for my Custodes, and while I like Dreadnoughts in general, I don't particularly  care for these ones. That, along with some beakies and the axe Praetor, went to one friend. Another was quite keen on the Spartan, so he got that and a pile of beakies as well. I mean there's plenty in this box to go around!

Since I decided ages ago that my Chaos Marines were Word Bearers, on account of my theology degree and so on, I feel like I've already made my choices as far as 30k is concerned as well. We're told in the rulebook that Word Bearers chapters were named after one of the constellations as seen from Colchis, and they seem to mostly be an adjective and a noun. Therefore, my Word Bearers are from the Morbid Fane chapter.

The first models I built from the box were the Cataphractii Terminators. Five of them ended up on Deathwatch duty, but the other five are my first 30k Word Bearers. I went with basically the opposite layout to the Deathwatch squad: these dudes are here to punch, with two chainfists and three power fists.

The heraldry of the Morbid Fane will be simple: chapter symbol on the left shoulder pad, unit symbol on the right. The main armor color will obviously be Word Bearers red, in this case Vallejo Dark Red. They'll wear the campaign badge on their right knee. Here's the first model I painted.

Word Bearers fluff mentions that the legion has a whole parallel command structure through their Chaplains. This gave me the idea to include squad-level chaplains in my army: lots of Horus Heresy Legion units let you give some models in a squad power weapons or something similar, or in this case, a chainfist. I'll also give them slightly different livery, like a bone trim on one shoulder plate and a black helmet here. I'm calling them Deacons.

Here's the sergeant.

And here's the whole unit: the Cataphractii Terminator squad House of Justice.

**

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, I bought Liber Mechanicum and was surprised to realize that I actually have a Horus Heresy army already, namely my Mechanicum Knights. Or indeed my Renegade Armigers. That means a good starting point for my Word Bearers would be to make an allied detachment. I can't think of a better place to start than a basic tactical squad: ten guys, bolters and bayonets, maybe a vexilla.

I decided I want the vexilla to be a proper old-fashioned back banner, so I got one off an old marine sprue, as well as chainsword and pistol arms for the sergeant. Even though the Mk VI marines are clearly bigger than old 40k ones, old bits fit just fine on the new models.

My squad is going to represent some Word Bearers signal troops. I mean there must have been some, you can't run massive military operations without signals. Therefore the squad will bear what I insist is the Imperial signals logo on their right shoulder pads: a red twin-tailed comet on a white background.

The vexilla also proclaims their battlefield role.

Here's the signals squad Deacon.

And the sergeant.

Come to think of it, they should probably also have one of those vox things.

This is the legion tactical squad Mightier are your Voices than the Manifold Winds in its entirety.

**

I did also end up getting Liber Hereticus, i.e. the traitor codex. It's another really big, satisfying book with lots and lots of rules and datasheets inside, which I feel I haven't even remotely started to come to grips with.

I'm also not really all that interested in any of the Rites of War, so I'm unsure whether I actually want a Praetor at all. So I'm leaving mine in the box for now.

However, as I was decorating my Cataprachtii from my collection of marine bits, I realized that I have one of those skull shoulder pads left over from my ancient Berzerkers, and a power axe from the Chaos Terminator Lord kit. That means I can build the most Word Bearer HQ possible: a Chaplain.

The arms are from the Berzerker and tactical marine kits, and I built a handle for the axe with copper wire, green stuff and a Wargame Exclusive skull.

As near as I can tell, chaplains and their black, skull-themed armor were a Word Bearers innovation. Therefore, Centurion Sor T'rizaron is decked out as an original Imperial Herald. I didn't have a proper crozius arcanum, but Liber Hereticus actually says it can be an axe as well.

Quite happy with the paint job, and I think that Berzerker skull pad is perfect.

She is Centurion Sor T'rizaron, Whose Name amongst ye is Wrath. With a Centurion and a tactical squad, I could now field an allied detachment for my Knights.

**

Now that I'm doing conversions, I might as well also start my Apothecarion Detachment, Come Away from the House of Death! I don't know why I like Apothecaries, but I do. Since neither GW nor Forge World will sell us Apothecaries at reasonable prices, I ordered a Legionary Apothecary conversion set from Kromlech. I already used one to make a Sister Hospitaller and liked it, so here's a Mk VI Apothecary for my signal troops.

There's an option to give Apothecaries volkite chargers, and since I have that special weapon box, why not? Volkite go bzzzt. The only additional work required was trimming down the Kromlech shoulder a bit, as it's slightly too wide at the bottom to take the Mk VI shoulder pad.

While I was at it, I made a second Apothecary for the Despoiler squad I was planning. The chainsword and bolt pistol are from the Deathwatch sprue.

Here they are painted up:

**

I mentioned a Despoiler squad; building Marines turned out to be so much fun that I also got a box of Mk IV Marines. All I've done so far is a tactical support squad, the Pillars of Gladness.

Rotor cannons are awesome. I also made a deacon for them, and gave the sergeant some extra detail.

**

And finally: the Kratos. I love big tanks, and I'm definitely getting myself at least one Shadowsword at some point. Actually, with the classic unit rules, I could make it a Legion Shadowsword. Or wait and see if they do a plastic Fellblade. But anyway, my point is that when the Kratos was announced, obviously I was getting one.

The kit was, perhaps surprisingly, an absolute breeze to build. I know I want my Kratos to do anti-tank things, so I wanted lascannons as my hull weapons. However, as near as I can tell, there's actually no reason to glue the hull weapons in, as they seem to slot into place and stay there quite nicely.

The sponsons I wanted to magnetize, and luckily that was very easy: the holes in the sponson mounts and the weapons are just about exactly the size of a 3mm magnet.

You can really tell the difference between a model where they've thought about magnetization, and one where they haven't.

I couldn't be bothered to magnetize the main gun; I knew I wanted the big battlecannon, so I went with it. All in all, the Kratos is a nice, chunky model, and it was fun to build.

So to round out my first, but sadly almost certainly not last tranche of Horus Heresy purchases, here is the Kratos Behold! his Mercies Flourish.

Complete with campaign colors.

It is a big chunk of tank, and I am pleased.

**

So, here's a poorly lit group shot of my Word Bearers so far.

While I was finishing all this up, Games Workshop announced the upcoming tenth edition of Warhammer 40,000, which looks a whole lot like Age of Sigmar 40,000. I'm not thrilled. We already had 9th edition codexes restricting wargear options to what came in the box, and the beginnings of the sigmarification of faction names with Drukhari, Aeldari and so on. While I agree that 40k could do with a rethink, I don't think this is one I like.

Most of all, the pace of change in 40k is just too much for me, and new statlines and everything is a bit much on top of that. One of the reasons I haven't been able to muster any enthusiasm for Age of Sigmar is that I feel like everything keeps getting changed for the sake of change. I fully expect that 40k will also begin to sigmarify. We'll have a Systyrs of Empreure codex soon enough.

So maybe it was quite lucky that I bought this Horus Heresy box.

Let's Play Battletech

You ladies of lubricity

That dwell in the bordello

Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-hee

For I am that kind of fellow

 - Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

BattleTech is almost as old as I am. Polygon did a cute little oral history of the game a few years back, which I enjoyed. I'm also fairly sure that Warhammer 40,000's Imperial Knights are stolen directly from BattleTech, and possibly a lot more; various other mech-related games also owe them a debt. Battletech is one of those things that's always been there; I've been aware of it for as long as I've known anything about wargaming, but I never got a chance to play it. Now that Catalyst Games has restarted the franchise, so to speak, and I'm getting back into smaller-scale miniature games, it was finally time to change that with their Beginner Box.

**

The Beginner Box is a cute little set that's very cheap. It comes with two mechs, a fold-out hex map and a couple of leaflets, including a small set of "getting started" rules.

The biggest disappointment in all of this is the fluff. There are decades of material and backstory and whatnot to Battletech - but you'll find none of that here. There's one little foldout with a galaxy map, and barely any material at all to get a handle on anything. I don't understand how you get your hands on an intellectual property like Battletech and then make this little effort to immerse people in it.

If you want the opposite experience, there's the PC game Battletech, which does great job getting you into the fluff and everything - and then absolutely refuses to explain how anything in the actual game works, or provide any kind of manual. Is it a law of Battletech that you can have either the fluff or the rules explained to you, but never both? The game itself was all right; I wasn't really that impressed, and the hardware requirements were brutal for my poor laptop.

I have been reading up on the fluff on sarna.net, though, and one thing I'll definitely say for Battletech is that it's not often you get to play a wargame as the telephone company. So I think purely in honor of that, I have to paint at least one mech in ComStar colors. As it happens, that means white, and as I found when I got back into painting miniatures with Star Wars: Rebellion, I love painting dirty white. So I've decided to paint the Wolverine that came with the starter box as a ComStar mech.

I am delighted to note that the Wolverine has been produced by, among others, a company called Bordello Military Goods, Inc. I wonder if the people responsible for that knew what a bordello is.

The other mech in the box is a Griffin, apparently originally from an early 1980s anime, but also Soundwave. Looking into the fluff, I find that like in so many other fictional properties, there's a girls' faction. I had a House Escher gang in Necromunda, I'll have a Magistracy of Canopus, um, lance? in Battletech. Delightfully, the uniform color for the Magistracy Armed Forces is turqoise and black, which I intend to fully embrace. Here's my first shot at a color scheme.

This Griffin represents my mechwarrior mercenary company, the 11th Riedquat Rangers (Electra's Own).

**

My first proper Battletech experience, however, happened at our friendly local game store, which hosted a Battletech event earlier this month. I grabbed myself a Hunchback from the mechs on offer, and ended up facing an Enforcer.

I was given a record sheet, and we started rolling a whole bunch of 2d6s. I had some success firing my giant autocannon at the Enforcer, eventually destroying its left torso completely. The Enforcer's return fire knocked my mech down, but I got up again.

The rules were actually pretty simple, certainly with an experienced player to walk me through them, and actually kinda fun. Although my superior firepower was having an impact, I wanted to have an appropriately Warhammer ending and try the mêlée rules: my Hunchback charged in.

The rest of the battle could hardly have gone more dramatically: our mechs traded blows on the roof of a building, until my Hunchback punched my opponent's mech in the face, killing his pilot!

**

I very much enjoyed my first Battletech experience, and I'm going to try to play more. There's whole oceans of rules, fluff and miniatures to get into here, and the Epic player in me can't help but notice all these tanks and infantry and whatnot, all in a very familiar scale...

Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

**

I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

Let's Paint Fallout: the Board Game

Several unidentified aircraft were spotted flying over the REPCONN Test Site by a local crackpot. He spoke to a toy bear near one of our microphones. "It's ghouls, I tell you. Religious ghouls in rockets, looking for a land to call their own. Don't you laugh at me! I know a spell that'll make you show your true form! A cave rat taught it to me."
- Radio New Vegas

Even though our board gaming has mostlt been on hold because of the pandemic, we did really enjoy Fantasy Flight's Fallout board game, and I got to thinking that I really should paint the miniatures. So here we go!

**

Super Mutant

I've gone for the Fallout 3 super mutant look instead of the classic green, because it's so much more interesting and will, I hope, make the model stand out a bit. The skin was done in Flat Yellow, the rags in (I think) Saddle Brown, and the metal bits are Gunmetal Grey and Brass. I then gave the whole thing a wash with watered-down Black Glaze, Skin Wash and Smoke to make the dude look appropriately grimy, and I think it worked pretty nicely!

This model was fun enough to paint that I'm seriously considering getting some Mödiphius Super Mutants.

**

Vault Dude

Of course the Vault guy had to be among the first models I painted as well!

His skin is Burnt Umber, and the hair is Black Grey. The vault suit is Dark Blue, with Saddle Brown, Gunmetal Grey and Copper accessories, with a little Smoke wash.

**

Mister Handy

I'm skipping ahead to the New California expansion here, but Mr. Handy had such a memorable debut in our first attempt at the co-operative New California scenario as a drug-dealing murder robot that I felt I had to paint him.

Of course, a robot is also kinda easy to paint! The upper body is Natural Steel and the lower Gunmetal Gray, and the eyes are Silver; the body got a wash of Black Glaze and a little Smokey Ink, and there's some Light Green to represent the drugs, and some Scarlet for the murder.

**

Ghoul

The ghoul was the MVP of our first co-op attempt and a past winner as well, so he was definitely next.

His shoes are black, the pants are London Grey and the vest is Light Grey; the shirt is Ivory. I painted the skin Tan Earth, gave it a light drybrush with Green Sky and a sort of wash with Sunny Skin Tone, followed by some watered-down Smokey Ink. I'm very happy with the result!

**

So here's the first batch of Fallout characters; there'll be more.