After loading a “New Game” from the file menu, choose which difficulty you’ll be playing by using the Setup menu in the toolbar. Each option has a different section of President Kennedy’s moon speech to add theme. In addition to properly selecting the Inner and Outer Planet missions, it will delete missions from the Explorable decks according to the rules restriction. Each setup option also randomly picks a tile for each explorable location (moon, mars, solar radiation, etc.) and places it in the appropriate place on the board.

Global Hotkeys

Q - Opens/Closes Advancements Window

W - Opens/Closes Missions Window

E - Opens/Closes Earth HQ Window

R - Opens/Closes Player Aid Window

Main Map

The main map is designed to fill the width of your screen, which means you’ll only need to use vertical scroll while playing. Click the “Select Zoom” button and choose “Fit Width” if the map is bigger/smaller than your current monitor at start.

All the tiles and the player aids on the main map have mouseover zoom enabled (hover for half a second to zoom in). This allows you to stay further zoomed out but still read the maneuvers clearly.

The Trade Zone is simply an area where players can drag out component cards they are buying/selling/trading to other players. This has no automated functionality.

The normal Location Tiles do not have any specific functions, but the explorable tiles can be peeked at (only the person selecting “peek” sees the other side) or flipped (reveal the tile to all players).

Each faction's Budget & Victory Points are tracked in the bottom right of the main window. Budgets are also reflected in the Advancement and Earth HQ windows for each faction. If you need to manually adjust either the Budget or VP, right click on it and manually enter the correct number. Budgets can also be adjusted on the Advancement or Earth HQ windows in the same fashion.

Spaceship Cards (where components and astronauts are stacked) and matching Spaceship Tokens can be found below each faction’s Budget and VP totals. Click and drag the tokens to move them around the map. They will display Move Trails to more easily allow other players to track your movements. Use Ctrl+M to clean up all move trails of selected counters (or click the “Mov” button in the far right of the toolbar to clear all move trails).

Spaceship tokens can be right clicked to add ‘time tokens’ to them for longer duration maneuvers. When the turn is advanced (see the Turn Tracker tab above), every ship on the map automatically has the number of turn on the timer decremented by 1.

This is merely a holding window for all the off-board cards in the game. You likely will never need to open it.