1) Game board: Place the game board centrally on the table. Place the 9 ocean tiles on their reserved space. Place the temperature and oxygen markers on their starting positions. Also place the generation marker on ’1’ on the TR track.

2) Resource cubes and remaining tiles: Placed so that everyone can reach them.

3) Project deck: Make sure you have no Corporate Era cards in the project deck or among the corporation cards. These are marked with a red and white icon in the lower left edge. Shuffle the project cards and place the project deck next to the board. Leave space for a discard pile beside it.

4) Players: The player who most recently won a game of Terraforming Mars is given the first player marker. Players choose their colors and take the corresponding player markers and a player board. In a standard game, you start with 1 extra production of each resource, so place a player marker on number 1 of each track on the player board. Each player also places one marker at the starting position (20) of the TR track on the game board.