One False Step Home Rulebook

Companion to the One False Step for Mankind rulebook.

Expansion Rules

You're on the Moon. Now what?

In One False Step Home it's time for the unfortunate souls who blasted to the Moon in the original game to send a few lucky ones back home, with the help of their friendly neighborhood Moon Men.

You will need the Rocket System cards, City cards, and Days of the Week cards from the original game, as well as the rules and the generic components.

The Board: Setting up the board is identical to One False Step for Mankind, but there are only six board sections. To make the deck, remove the cards from board segments 7 and 8, as well as the 3 cities from the one board you don't use.

The cities on the Moon are named after the home towns of the lunar settlers, though if it makes you happy you can add "new" to all the city names.

Moon Caves: There is a new resource type on the board, the Moon Cave. On Tuesday, when your other holdings are producing Food and Gold, these caves produce people. Put these counters on the train icons of your active cities, and use them just like ordinary people.

Rockets: There are no rocket systems, and no Know-how. You have small, one-piece rockets, represented by single cards (you can use system cards, or 10-sided dice, or just keep track on paper).

Each player starts with one rocket, and can buy more at a cost of 7 Gold each. One 4-Food fee launches all of your rockets at once, since you still only have to throw one party. Upgrading rockets costs the price marked on the cards, and success with a rocket still earns you a single influence chip, plus extra points for the people on that rocket.

What All This Means: People are the most valuable resource in One False Step. Although the Moon produces fewer basic resources, such as Gold and Food (actually, the "gold" is diamond dust and the "food" is cheese, if you want to get technical), she makes up for this deficit by producing people. Adorable little moon people. Lots of them.

You'll notice that none of the County Seats is connected to a Moon Cave, but pretty much every other city is. Whoever starts producing people first will have a pretty strong advantage, which means that it's worth it to pay dearly (if you have to) for the first Moon-Man producing city.

Moon Men are helpful in the early game to ramp up your resource production, and defend your most valuable claims, but you may quickly find that you are running a surplus of Moon Men and want to put them on your rockets.

If your strategy involves getting a lot of people on your rocket, you'll probably want to invest in improving a single rocket to level 7 or 8 before you buy a second, and putting all your men on that rocket.

But fear not, if you acquire few Moon Caves. It's better to pursue a multi-rocket strategy and forego Moon Man production rather than getting into too big a battle over Moon Man production. The multi-rocket strategy is built around spending most of your gold on minimally-upgraded rockets (build each up to level 3 or 4, at most, and spend your money buying new rockets). You must run a food surplus of 4, so that you can afford a rocket shot every turn. This strategy also preserves most of your original Influence chips, so you will have less ground to recover with your successful shots.

All in all, we think this expansion is a great improvement to the game. It actually cuts the average game time from 3 hours to 2, which is no small feat.

Variations: You can add extra people to the basic game, if you like how they work here. They come from big cities. Each Tuesday, roll one ten-sided die, and compare that number to the population of every active city. If a city's population (in thousands) is equal to or greater than the die roll, that city produces one person. It's a little like owning a Moon Cave, but much more random.

You can also add the option to buy a new full-sized rocket in the basic game for the price of 20 Gold.

For a particularly mind-bending exercise, you can build a 6-panel rectangular board and treat the entire board as if it wraps around. This is called the "Small Moon" variation and it makes for a board with no safe corners. Try it at your peril.