War of the Worlds game: more players?

I felt I had my game concept down. Martians, Earthlings, technology, extermination, Black Gas, disease ... but I felt like it was missing something.

I was struggling for a while. And then finally, I went around a friend's house and played a four player game of Root.

Wow.

I see. I need two new races.

Why?

• I play some multiplayer games at work; Coup, Exploding Kittens, Condottiere, Cockroach Poker, Skulls. And the dynamic with several players is fantastic. It's more fun than the two-player games I have: Hive & Gwent (which are still awesome).
• Boardgaming is a social activity and a game supporting 2-4 players should be more appealing than one supporting only 2. So it should sell better.
• Every other "War of the Worlds" game is two-player, so this is a unique selling point.

I considered the straight-off-the-bat-obvious ideas for making this a three or four player game:

• Each player controls a different part of the armed forces at the time; Army, Navy, and the (experimental in the 1890s) Airforce.
• Each player controls a different army? British, German, Ottoman? Each one with different tech/units etc.
• Two players control the Martians - one conquesting on Earth, one on Mars? ... maybe?

None of this worked. I wanted to keep the asymmetry already present in the game with new races. They must all look, play and be fundamentally different.

I went back to the book, searching. And after a while, I figured them out.

Introducing the new races; The Red Weed and the The Venusians.

The Red Weed
The Red Weed player is flora not fauna. A literal weed. Not even sentient. Can't even.

The book suggests the Weed is an unintended Martian hitchhiker. Its job in the story is to provide 'foreshadowing'; it dies from disease before the Martians do.

But in my game, some horticultural idiot GRAFTS some weed onto a nightshade plant. It survives. The new weed armed with genetic code to survive viruses, fungi and the like grows super-fast.

The Red Weed is an expansionist race. The Weed makes seeds, which germinate into more plants, which in turn make more seeds. It can't fight, or attack. It's a plant after all. Its goal is to cover the planet.

The Red Weed player's game is about genetic material. It will evolve every turn, gathering new genetic material. It will encounter new plants and gain new abilities from those plants. It also gathers genetic errors and has to stave off genetic collapse when the errors accumulate. The player will have to manage the rise and collapse whilst trying to expand to cover the world.

The Venusians The book mentions the word "Venus" just five times. It suggests that the Martians launch a successful assault against Venus after the failure of the Earth invasion. That's about it, and didn't give me much to work with.

Venus itself is a funny old place. Our closest (well, maybe ) planetary neighbour, most of what we know about it was discovered only recently. Back in the 1890s, almost nothing was known about it due to its dense cloud layer.

We know now that it's basically Hell. Someone standing on the surface of Venus experiences the same pressure as being a mile under the ocean. It's also 460 degrees Celsius (lead would melt on the surface). And there's a 500 mile an hour hurricane blowing constantly. So, if you live there, you are probably pretty tough. And you live either in the clouds (made of acid), or underground.

My Venusians live underground, and are tough mole-like people. Their aim coming to Earth is to terraform it into a Venus-like planet they could survive on. They intend to do this by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and raising the CO2 level. The Venusians can't survive directly on Earth yet - they'd explode due to a lack of air pressure. So they have to do everything remotely from Venus by sending over robots.

Their goal in the game is to raise the Carbon Dioxide level from 0.04% to 15%. This will cause everything on planet to suffocate.

The Venusian Player plays an economy game. They create three mines. Each one mines a single resource each turn provided they aren't destroyed. They can spend those resources fixing stuff, making more robots, or burning it to raise the CO2 level. They also need to contend with the fact that they are sending orders from Venus, and there's a time-delay ...

Along with the Earthlings and The Martians, that's now the four races I now have in the game. Time will tell if this was a good idea or not... :)