Red Planet Farming is a new free game about feeding colonists

Growing crops on Mars is no easy task as you're about to find out with Red Planet Farming, a new and free strategy game.

You take on the role of the Agricultural Director of Mars, your job is to ensure the survival of various outposts across the barren planet by producing food in various shelters. Not an easy job, due to the extreme and constantly changing weather patterns on Mars. You will be with dust storms, radiation, extreme cold, meteor showers and other terrible things.

It's deceptively simple but quite a delightful turn-based strategy game, one that slowly grows more complex but at a pace that keeps it interesting enough. Place down crops, ensure they have what they need in the form of a few upgrades per cell with each crop needing protection or an upgrade that's a different combination to another, and make sure you have enough to support a growing population that changes each turn.

Developed by a group of graduates and current students of the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn, New York. They received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Games Production Grant, a yearly award to fund game development at the NYU Game Center to support and help raise understanding of science, technology and economics. You can read a little more on that here. They even had NASA lend a hand for some technical support and advice.

Find Red Planet Farming free on Steam.