Red Colony

I've decided that until a better name comes along, the Mars thing will be called Red Colony.

I had had some ideas, lots of different ideas actually, about how different parts of the game might work. Then I was reminded of this blog post my friend Scott made back in July, and I realized that what I really ought to do is take the base concept of what I wanted to try (managing your income stream) and make the simplest game possible out of that. So after a little thought along those lines on my way to lunch, here's what I came up with:

Players should get 1 Ship action and 1 Pawn action each turn:
Ship actions are...
(a) Get a cube (number limited by total capacity of ship, and type limited by ship configuration)
(b) Move the ship from Earth to Mars or vice versa. Clearly you can't get a cube if the ship is at Mars, and I think the idea is that you can't change the configuration unless your pawn is at Earth.
Pawn actions are...
(a) Move to any explored tile connected to your 'base'
(b) Move to and explore any tile adjacent to an explored tile connected to your base
(c) Build a Building on an explored tile (probably have to connect back to your base)
(d) Update ship configuration (must be on Earth to do this)
(e) possibly Get a cube (if at Earth)
(f) Move people around (in the case that buildings require people to operate)

You can bring your pawn to Earth with you if it's at your base when the ship goes from Mars to Earth, and of course you can bring your pawn with you when the ship goes from Earth to Mars (and I imagine you would always do the latter, not necessarily the former)

Another option might be to allow players to simply do any 2 of those each turn, so if you wanted to you could get 2 cubes, at the expense of not exploring or building that turn... I'm not sure if that's better or worse.