I think one of the keys to playing the game well is to be able to eyeball your patents and, knowing what’s possible on the map, come up with a useful mission. We easily spent four hours (!) just playing the card game and not even putting anything on that map, because we did it backwards and looked for missions we wanted to do (everyone went to Mars, which sucks because Mars is bullshit) first and went shopping for cards based on that.

Our winner did not do that and waited ’til he could get out to the asteroids with the right ship. He had an amazing robonaut that he instantly upgraded to an even more amazing ET version, which unlocked the map for him in ways we couldn’t begin to attempt.