High Frontier Walkthrough Part 1: Getting Started Phirax 10/13/2010

Getting Started
Setting Up the Game
Unpack the game, grab a pair of scissors and do the following:

1) Place the Game Map on the table. (You may need to buy a larger table.)

Figure 1.1 - What an astrophysicist's daydream looks like - the High Frontier basic and expanded maps.

2) Place one of the Player Mats in front of each player.

(They are the sheets of paper with card spaces for LEO
Stack/Outpost Stack/Freighter stack at the top.)
3) Find the Placeholder Sheet and cut out the five Crew
cards on the bottom of the sheet. (It has spaces for
Thruster/Robonaut/Refinery cards in the upper left
corner and Resource Exploitation Tracks in the upper
right. Only cut out the five cards on the bottom!)
4) Now put the scissors away. (And no running!)
5) Lay the now-smaller Placeholder Sheet to the side of the
map where it can be accessed easily by all players.
6) Give each player one of the Crew cards. Each is a Figure 1.2 - This is how a full color
Player Mat appears to a dog.
different color and represents your player faction. (The
name of your faction is in the lower
left corner of the card.)
7) Dump all the bits and plastic disks
onto the middle of the game map.
(Space Junk!)
8) Slide all the transparent disks (clear, Figure 1.3 - This is how black and white crew cards appear to
red and blue) and black disks off the people with vivid imaginations .
map to an area next to the

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High Frontier Walkthrough Part 1: Getting Started Phirax 10/13/2010

Placeholder Sheet. (The transparent disks represent

water tanks and are used to mark the Resource
Exploitation Tracks on the Placeholder Sheet.
Black disks are used for failed mines on the game
map.)
9) Take 4 transparent blue disks and place them on the
four "Start" spaces on the Resource Exploitation
Figure 1.4 - In space, transparent disks are
Tracks on the Placeholder Sheet. conveniently translucent.
10) Each player takes 4 clear transparent disks and
places them on the bottom of their Player Mat on the hexagonal space marked "Water
Tank Orbital Depot." (You start the game as the proud owner of
4 giant water tanks floating in orbit around the Earth. Look how
excited you are and the game hasn't even started yet!)
11) Sort the five colors of remaining bits cluttering up the map. Each
player looks at the color of their player card and they take the
bits that match this color. Place these bits next to your player
card. (Each player should have taken 6 opaque disks, 6 cubes
and 2 rockets.)
Figure 1.5 - Each player
12) Take the remaining bits from the unclaimed colors and place starts with 4 Water Tanks
them back in the game box. (These pieces will not be used in
the game.)
13) Grab the 24 patent cards and separate them into 3 stacks by type (white side up on all
cards): 8 Thrusters, 9 Robonauts and 7
Refineries. Shuffle these stacks and place
them (white side up) onto the spaces
reserved for them on the Placeholder Sheet.
(These cards will form the sections of
player's rocket ships, but right now they
remain technologies on the verge of being
discovered.) Figure 1.6 - Patent Card spaces on the Placeholder
14) The six-sided die should be the only thing Sheet after the player cards are removed.
remaining on the game map. Have each
player roll the die. The player that rolls the highest number is the starting player and
places the die next to their player card. (In case of a tie for highest number, have only
the players involved in the tie re-roll until one of them is the highest.)

Now you are ready to play. Go Taikonauts!

The Starting Tableau

To Boldly Go...
As the game begins, humanity stands on the threshold of a new age of space exploration. The
Apollo moon missions are a distant memory and after years of populating the skies around the
Earth with satellites and space stations and sending small, unmanned ships on one-way
journeys to destinations throughout the solar system, mankind is finally on the brink of
discovering a series of technologies that will make space exploration cheaper, faster and allow
a continuous presence of factories and outposts on the planets, moons and water-rich asteroids
populating our solar system. You play one of five factions on Earth striving to be the leading
force of this new age.

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 High Frontier Walkthrough Part 1: Getting Started Phirax 10/13/2010

Your Starting Resources

Each player starts the game with 4 clear transparent disks on their Player Mat and a Crew card
in their hand. The clear transparent disks represent 40-ton water tanks, which serve two
purposes in the game: as currency, and as rocket propellant. That's right, in the near future
depicted by this game our dependence on paper money, credit cards and fossil fuels has been
overcome! Now we use 40-ton water tanks for everything! You want to download that hot
new song on iTunes? Send Steve Jobs a couple of 40-ton water tanks, and before you ask, the
answer is yes, Steve Jobs pretty much owns all the water on the planet by now.

What do you think the Crew card in your hand represents?

If you guessed "a crew" then you would be wrong!
Actually, the card represents a space vehicle along with its
crew and all their equipment and supplies. There are three
important pieces of information on your Crew card that you
should become familiar with right away: 1) the crew Mass (in
the upper left corner of the card), 2) the Thruster Triangle on the
bottom of the card (Shimizu Corporation and United Nations don't
have this), and 3) the special ability listed in the horizontal color strip
Figure 2.1 - Crew Card along the middle of the card.

Crew Cards
The Mass box in the upper left hand corner of the card tells you how much your crew ship
weighs. (All the crews weigh 1, except the United Nations crew which weighs 0.) In case
you were interested, each mass point represents a quadecaton. Wow! I have no idea what
that means, but it seems really, really heavy. (There is a section towards the end of the
rulebook that explains game scale conversions.) As a general rule less weight is better in
space flight as the heavier your ship gets the more propellant you will need to move it, and
consequently the more money you will need for purchasing propellant.

Three of the player factions have Thruster Triangles on the bottom of their cards. This means
that the Crew vehicle has an engine capable of moving this ship through space without the
need to purchase a separate Thruster unit. That is the good news. The bad news is that the
propulsion systems on the Crew cards are a terribly inefficient and costly way to move
through space. Much better technologies await you in the Thruster stack on the Placeholder
sheet.

Finally, Each player card has a special ability listed in the horizontal color strip along the
middle of the card that adds variety and personality to the different factions. NASA earns
money for launching payloads into low Earth orbit - important in the early game. The
Shimizu Corporation can hoard new technologies without the limits imposed on other
factions. The European Space Agency has a powerful beam technology that can allow ships
to move faster in space. The Chinese and United nations have technologies that come into
play later in the game, when factions begin to establish outposts on sites throughout the solar
system.

Player Mat
I have a cousin named Matt. He considers himself a "playah" but I think he is a bit spacey.
Why am I talking about my cousin? What does this have to do with High Frontier? Why do I
keep going off on tangents instead of just telling you about the game components? As it turns

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High Frontier Walkthrough Part 1: Getting Started Phirax 10/13/2010

out both my cousin and the High Frontier player mat are a bit
hard to get used to at first, but if you give them a chance, you
will find that they will reward your effort. How about that for
a segue? Here is a scoring update: Segue King 1 - Pesky
Readers 0.

The High Frontier player mat can indeed be daunting. There

are text-filled arrows that point off the mat, a chart filled with
jagged lines, a place to store water, and what appears to be an
entire section devoted to what you can do during your turn.
Phew! That's a lot of stuff. Even my cousin Matt - as
daunting as he is - only has one of those things (a place to
store water, which he calls his "bladder.")

Science Ain't Pretty Figure 2.2 - Odorless Player Mat

There are many schools of thought that believe good design
requires a prodigious use of white space. This player mat didn't go to one of those fancy
schools. Instead of wasting its time learning about highfalutin things like enhanced
readability and reduced eye strain, this player mat got a real job so that it could provide you
with all the information you will need for your forays out into the solar system.

And when it was finished cramming as much information as humanly possible into a single
sheet of paper did it stop to admire itself like one of those snooty perfume adds you find in
glossy magazines? You know, the ones with lots of white space and a little strip that you
unfold to smear perfume all over yourself so that you smell pretty. Let me clue you in on
something, this is an astrophysicist's player mat. Astrophysicists never smell pretty. They
don't look nice and they are always crammed full of information - just like this player mat.

But how does that help you? The player mat will be explained in detail
in later parts of the walkthrough, but for now you just need to know
that you have four 40 ton water tanks stored on your mat.

Cards "In Hand"

The cards in High Frontier are two sided, with a white and a black side.
The technologies depicted on the black side are more advanced than
their white counterparts and can only be developed later in the game
once players have established research facilities in space. If
Figure 2.3 - Space Riddle: When is a
players actually held their cards in their hand like in a traditional hand not really a hand?
card game, it might become confusing as to which side of the card
was available to the player. To alleviate this problem, and to free up your hands for more
important tasks like dice rolling and beverage grasping, you keep your "hand" cards on the
table to the right of your player mat. The side facing up is the technology that you have
access to. Players are also free to inspect the hand cards of their opponents.

Lets recap what we have learned so far: 1) The game has lots of bits, 2) Spaceships are
heavy, 3) Steve Jobs is rich, 4) My cousin Matt has a bladder, 5) When astrophysicists design
a square, it has 20 sides, and finally, 6) Your hand is not connected to your body. Also, you
should have learned that the basic setup of the game is pretty straightforward. But how does
the game actually play? To answer that question, see the High Frontier Walkthrough Part 2:
Your First Turns (An Introduction to LEO Operations).