What is First Contact: 2035?
…and how does a game with 200+ players even make sense?
First Contact: 2035 is a game about what happens when aliens arrive. How would the nations of the world react? How would big business respond? That’s up to the players to decide The only thing is - there are at least 200 people involved...
Not quite a board game, not quite a role-playing game, not quite a LARP, First Contact is a megagame. It takes elements from all sorts of other games, mashing them together, and seeing what happens - like a Rube Goldberg machine made of people.
Let’s try and break this down.
Players divided into teams - nations, the UN, corporations, scientists, aliens, press. Each team has several players with different roles, including: heads of state, interior ministers, supreme commanders of the armed forces, station commanders, head diplomats, chief scientists, CEOs, COOs, CTOs, and… other things we won’t discuss right now.
There are five large maps of the world - one for each continent - on which part the action happens. This means troop movements, border skirmishes, industrial espionage, alien landings, droughts, civil wars, climate change events, you name it. But the essence of the game happens when two sides meet and talk. Are you going to make trade deals? Alien alliances? False promises? It’s entirely up to you.
Can you hear your nation’s call?
Every role has something different to do, but each player’s choices will affect everyone else in the game, like an angry butterfly armed to the gunnels flapping its wings in China and causing a diplomatic crisis in Nigeria.
Nations all have goals - whether that’s diplomatic, to become the pre-eminent voice on their continent or ascending to the UN Security Council, or military, to take back sovereign territories long held by hated neighbours or to establish themselves as a major new global player.
These goals are fought for in many theatres. This means great big maps of the continents showing major landmarks, industries, military bases and many, many tanks, but also in the diplomatic arena. You’ll set your national budget, deal with public opinion, conduct espionage on your rivals, and even enter the Olympics (actual athletics not involved).
Heads of state call the shots, attend the UN and do all the showy diplomacy
Military commanders head to the world maps each turn, shooting at one another - and those suspicious lights in the sky
Interior ministers run the show at home, controlling the budget and making sure it all runs
Foreign ministers are the nation’s eyes and ears - they talk, eavesdrop and stay plugged into world events
World peace or World Police?
But what’s to stop a bunch of hard-nosed gamers with stacks of tanks and cards marked 'nuclear weapons’ from turning Africa to glass? Hard-nosed diplomacy and an even bigger stick.
While most nations are teams of four people, the superpowers - that’s the USA, Russia and China - have military presences across the world, and sit on the UN Security Council, alongside Britain and France. This super-national body has the power to summon world leaders to its summits to solve big issues. But are they doing it for their own ends or the good of all?
Greed is good
Of course, the 21st century isn’t just a competition between nations. This is the era of the megacorp - and if war is good for business, an alien invasion could send profits through the roof.
The eight corporate teams are at the cutting edge of research and technology. It’s their job to survey the market, see what people want and sell it to them. Along the way you’ll design new tech - including reverse engineering weird alien artefacts - playing the stock market and making sure you’re the biggest company on the planet, complete with the largest and most obnoxious HQ…
In practise, this means you’ll be picking your way through a dozen tech trees, selling military and economic apparatus to the nations (preferably at a gigantic mark up) and then ploughing it all back into research. Whoever has the highest share price at the end is crowned king of capitalism.
Life, the universe and everything
There are also itinerant scientist-geniuses running around trying to answer the big questions. They’re a loosely aligned group of team-mates and rivals trying to further cause of human understanding - and earn the biggest certificates and rosettes proving that they have all the answers.
We can’t say too much more about the science at present, but it’s the key to everything…
Read all about it
You may well wonder how with 200 people all pursuing their own agendas anyone knows what’s going on. That’s where the world media comes in. Every turn there’s a press broadcast to fill people in on what’s going on on the other side of the world. Half a dozen hard-pressed journalists have to scour the room each turn, interviewing world leaders, gathering information and delivering a five-minute broadcast, turning madness into method. In many ways this is the most hectic job of all.
The chances of anything coming from Mars…
Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want?
If you want to find out more about the aliens we suggest you sign up for the game when tickets are released in January…
