Surviving Mars is certainly not your average console game. Sure, it’s set in a sci-fi future where humans must fight to survive in the arid wastelands of space, but you’ll find that surviving our Mars is more about keeping tabs on your colonists’ mental health than flying spaceships. It’s a city-building game where players lead a colonization effort on behalf of a sponsor back on earth. You must manage resources, research scientific anomalies, and build your own life-supporting dome on the red planet. And now with our first-ever expansion, Space Race, launching on November 15, you’ll have to contend with rival colonies too!

Space Race puts you up against other sponsors who want to outdo your colony’s efforts, and that comes with more responsibilities and challenges to face. Here’s a look at a few of them in our latest trailer.

Or, you could see the new expansion for yourself! We are hosting a streaming event tomorrow at 17:00 CET / 08:00 PST at the Space Race: Rival Colony stream, and you can join our own Space Race here: https://mixer.com/paradoxinteractive

To celebrate this first expansion, Surviving Mars will have a free weekend for Xbox One players at the launch of Space Race from November 15 to 18, so now is a great time to explore another planet for the first time here.

With rival colonies on the map, players can vie for milestones, anomalies and even important colonists with several other AI colonies backed by competing sponsors. Or you can keep it friendly by establishing trade agreements and responding to their distress calls (and hoping they respond to yours). Your relationship with them will be dynamic, and can even get difficult at times, but ultimately Earth is far, far away and you might need to rely on your Martian neighbors. After all, humankind is most resourceful in a competition

We’ve also seen a lot of members of our community asking to know more about the lives of individual colonists in the middle of this grand experiment. What’s going on at the colonist level of this massive endeavor? What’s with the Flat Mars Society and how can it even exist? What happens when a dome wants to secede from the colony? With Space Race, players can now play out narrative events throughout the colonization process that help add a much-needed human, personal feel to each game and reveal the realities of life in the dome.

Lastly, we’ve also reworked some of the mission sponsor mechanics so that each sponsor has a really different playstyle with their own goals to complete and unique advantages such as special vehicles or buildings. Adding unique buildings and vehicles was critical for our goal. Now every sponsor feels acutely distinctive, and we expect our players will play them differently. This means that even if you successfully establish your colony, you can always go back and take on a whole new challenge with a new mission sponsor (and we’ve added more sponsors, to boot)!

If you get the Space Race Plus bundle, you can also listen to pop music while you play from some of the sponsors’ home countries with the Marsvision Song Contest and get a special Colony Design set for some special buildings to add to your dome. These are some fun extra additions that we thought the community might enjoy. The music especially makes a big difference in a game like Surviving Mars where you might get absorbed in a play session for hours.

All of these changes have come from a vocal and engaged community of players who’ve stuck by our sides since the beginning. They’ve been clear about what would really take this game to the next level and we’d be fools to ignore them. That’s why we’re so excited to be able to launch Space Race next week and have even more content to come!