Corporations
All the roles at First Contact: 2035 are designed to ensure every player will have an awesome day. Regardless of what role you play, whether it’s the leader of a country, a scientist attempting to understand the alien’s biology or a member of the press reporting on the day’s chaos, we expect you’ll have a fantastic time.
You can find an outline of the roles in corporation teams below, and a full list of corporations and their team sizes at the bottom of the page.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Eight corporations will be represented in the game and each one will need to be led by a forward-thinking CEO. The CEO will manage the team and set strategy, negotiate with Heads of State, choose when and how to upgrade the corporation’s buildings on the map and ultimately decide which products and services will be researched and sold.
Are you someone who enjoys getting things done and meeting your goals? Playing a CEO is all about selling products, making money and pleasing your customers and investors. You’ll have serious competition in the form of seven other corporations, but if you like a challenge, save the date!
Chief Operating Officer (COO)
As a Chief Operating Officer, your primary focus is all about ensuring the right products are built at the right time and shipped out to customers. The CEO may be setting strategy, but really it’s the COO that makes things happen. In addition to recommending which corporate buildings need to be upgraded and when, you’ll focus on selling to countries and working out how your corporation’s build points will be spent each turn.
Technology moves quickly in the modern world and customers don’t necessarily know what they want to buy. You’ll help them understand what you have in your product catalogue today and what’s coming in tomorrow. You’ll need to be good at negotiating to ensure your corporation gets the best deal for the time, effort and money you’ve put into the latest products in your technology roadmap. Got what it takes?
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
The Chief Technology Officer is focused on ensuring the right resources are in place to move the pipeline of products forward. Additionally, advising the CEO on which products the market wants will be critical as well as building relationships with the global scientific and military communities to ensure you have access to the latest thinking and resources in their sectors.
If you like to plan ahead and work out which resources you’ll need for the roadmap of products, this role could be for you. You’ll need to be able to successfully negotiate with scientific and military personnel to obtain the requirements for your corporation’s next project and advise the CEO what is possible from the technology tree. There are so many possibilities, what will you choose to do?
Teams
THE AMERICAN FRUIT COMPANY
Team Size: 3
Established in Managua, Nicaragua in 1856 by visionary American entrepreneurs, where it is still based, The American Fruit Company has been through a lot in nearly 200 years of existence.
Today it is best known, as Forbes puts it, as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, operating through numerous smaller subsidiaries and controlling a full 37% of all arable land in North America. At the same time, ever increasing food demands of the world have pushed AFC to innovate widely to supply its markets.
ANEMCO
Team Size: 3
Anemco began as British-Arabian Onshore in 1937, and in 1972 changed its name to the Anglo-Emirati Petroleum Company. It underwent a radical transformation in 2003, becoming Anemco. A series of fortuitous mergers in the late 2020s have seen Anemco become the largest international oil and petroleum products producer in the world, operating a near total monopoly over oil production in the Arabian peninsula from its headquarters in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Never one to rest on its laurels, and facing increasing demand and dwindling supply, Anemco has now set its sights on energy production in the broader region-aiming to a total monopoly over Middle Eastern fields by the mid-2040s.
ASTRALEON
Team Size: 3
Named for its founder’s Reddit handle (StarLion_42069, from which he occasionally still posts in the r/goldbugs Subreddit), Astraleon has grown exponentially since it was founded in 2013, becoming the world’s leading private space transportation company.
Headquartered in a zero-tax haven in Windhoek, Namibia, Astraleon’s watchword is “disruption” and its significant holdings in both cryptocurrency and Krugerrands speak to an independent-mindedness - and a willingness to break down those same government structures that have so often lavished it with lucrative contracts.
CHARLEMAGNE HOLDINGS
Team Size: 3
Established all the way back in 1885 - making it one of the oldest of the “Big 8” corps - Charlemagne Holdings (formerly the Royal Belgian-Congo Trading Company) is a company committed to letting go of the past and keeping an eye on the future.
Still based in Brussels, Belgium, Charlemagne Holdings would become the largest mineral conglomerate on the African continent in 2028, thanks not least to its platform of innovations, bringing 5G app connectivity to the artisanal mining sector.
GROSS PHARMACEUTICALS
Team Size: 3
Now based at a PO Box address in the British Virgin Islands, Groß Pharmaceuticals is the undisputed king of American healthcare. It began life in Maspeth, NY, founded in 1945 as a small chemical compounds supplier by a group of German émigrés.
KASCHEM
Team Size: 3
Previously known as the Caspian Regional Department of Potash Fertiliser and Carnalite Production, KasChem (Каснкем) was famously sold to private investors for a single US dollar in 1993.
Since then it has gone from strength, even surviving in 2004 a tragic group-decapitation jetski incident involving all but one of its sitting board members. Based in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, today it’s one of the world’s leading producers of both industrial and household chemical products.
KRIEG CONCERN
Team Size: 3
Until recently, Krieg Concern had been making the headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons, after a 2033 investigative documentary aired on GNN laid bare the company’s toxic corporate culture, triggering a massive shakeup at the top of its Singapore head office.
Since then, Krieg has rebranded as “the most inclusive and diverse employer in the high-yield munitions and tactical armaments sector™”.
WUBI
Team Size: 3
In its relatively short existence, Wubi (sometimes translated as “incomparable” or “matchless”) has transformed itself from humble beginnings. Once the low-cost production arm of one of the larger western tech companies, it is now the world’s premier IT and telecommunications innovator, based in Taipei, Taiwan.
Fronted by its mascot, the adorable Wubi Bear (努力工作的小熊), Wubi builds - and generously manages - some 43% of the world’s 5G networks. And while recent exposés have shed a rather unflattering light on the working conditions at many of the company’s largest manufacturing facilities, “笨人先起身, 笨鸟早出林” as the Wubi Bear likes to say!