To be more precise, Navigating Terraforming Mars: have you seen how much stuff is out there!?
If you’ve played Terraforming Mars, you’ll know what a great strategy game it is. But nothing’s perfect… Perhaps—heretical though it may sound to some—you’re getting bored with it after a few dozen games and fancy something different: a faster game, or the opposite, a longer game; or you want a different game mechanic but the same theme. (If you want a different theme, but the same mechanic, then stop reading: that’s a topic for another blog post.)
I should note that I’m not going into detail on any of the game variants and expansions—you can find complete reviews elsewhere on the Zatu blog.
The Original
In Terraforming Mars, published almost a decade ago by FryxGames, you control a ‘corporation,’ accumulating points and resources by buying and playing ‘project’ cards (which, for example, can crash an asteroid into the planet, or introduce wildlife, or mine resources), as well as placing cities, oceans and greenery tiles on a shared map of the planet. This occurs over a series of ‘generations,’ whereeach generation comprises several rounds of player turns. All the while, you’re increasing the temperature and oxygen levels until Mars is fully terraformed, signalling the end of the game.
The base box splits the corporations and projects into basic and ‘Corporate Era’ cards, the latter adding to the complexity of the game. As the rule book says: ‘Corporate Era focuses on economy and technology. These are projects that do not contribute directly to the terraforming, but make the corporations stronger, adding new strategic choices to the game. Playing Corporate Era makes the game longer and more complex. We do not recommend it for players new to Terraforming Mars.’
Some folk (me included!) find the earlier rounds of the game a little tedious—players can’t do very much with the limited resources at their disposal. The Terraforming Mars: Prelude expansion contain cards that give a little extra kick at the beginning of the game (somewhat like being able to play a couple of very beneficial projects for free before the game starts), so that you hit the Martian ground running. Games jumpstarted using the prelude cards tend to be a little quicker to play as a result of that. Prelude is the one expansion I always play with.
On the other hand, you might find the basic game is over and done all too quickly. I’ve already mentioned the Corporate Era cards, but there are expansions that add extra concepts to the game: Venus Next, Colonies and Turmoil.
Terraforming Mars: Venus Next adds an extra terraforming scale, but it doesn’t actually count towards ending the game—you can accumulate points on Venus, but you can do just the same on Mars without paying much attention to the other planet. The expansion also introduces an optional ‘Solar Phase’ which speeds play up a little by inserting an extra terraforming action each generation, but the whole expansion feels like a bit of a distraction to me. In fact, the one thing that feels off about this one is introducing Venus at all—it’s a heck of a long way from Mars, so the idea that activities on one can affect the other seems a bit of a stretch!
Terraforming Mars: Colonies adds, well, colonies in other parts of the solar system. Sometimes, the luck of the card draw in the base game could mean you struggle to accumulate the resources you need to accomplish some desired action—with this expansion, as an alternative to hoping for the right cards, you can travel to and interact with these colonies to collect specific resources.
It’s a cute little expansion, and I think I prefer it to Venus (but not as much as Prelude).
Next on the list is Terraforming Mars: Turmoil. This is quite a heavy beast, bringing a whole heap of politics to the game table as you jostle for influence and control of a solar system government. It also adds ‘global events,’ which are (usually) catastrophes affecting all players (e.g., riots in every city on the planet, costing players with larger numbers of cities more in lost money), but with a mechanism allowing each player to prepare for the worst before it happens (in the example given, perhaps a player would postpone city building until after the event has passed).
Besides these, there are a few smaller expansions. The original Prelude mentioned above was the first expansion, and its cards are unrelated to any expansion that has come since. Terraforming Mars: Prelude 2 contains prelude (and other) cards which interact nicely with the other expansions. (A consequence of this is that this expansion is of little value unless you have at least some of the others.)
There’re also several additional maps that add a little variety: Hellas & Elysium, Utopia & Cimmeria and Amazonis & Vastitas. Besides a different layout of hex types and their benefits, these provide different awards and milestones; additionally, the maps in the third one are bigger, which improves playability for larger numbers of players. Another expansion provides a variety of alternative milestones and awards for any of the maps (including the original game’s), with the rather unimaginative name of Terraforming Mars: Milestones & Awards.
If you’re a solo game fan, the game’s single player mode is rather dull: play for a certain number of generations, and if you terraform Mars before the end, you’ve won. Terraforming Mars: Automa provides a fairly sophisticated automated opponent, the MarsBot. (Unfortunately, unlike, say, the Root ‘clockwork’ bots, MarsBot supports only solo games, and can’t be used to add an additional opponent to a game with more players.)
One nice thing about the expansions is that they all work together fairly well (though if you lack some of the earlier released expansions, you might have to remove a few cards from the later ones).
Finally, there are promo cards; these tend to be available at conventions and the like, though FryxGames have assembled various compilations. These don’t add a huge amount to the game, but who wouldn’t want penguins on Mars, or even rats?
A Totally Different Game
Well, two totally different games… Both are smaller, quicker games, but you’re still terraforming Mars—same basic concepts, same iconography, etc.
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition speeds things up by removing a lot of player interaction (which includes cutting out awards and milestones, and no getting in other people’s way on a large central map), such that players can operate pretty much simultaneously. The Mars board has almost vanished in this game, and the mechanic is card-based engine building.
If you find you like this variant, there are expansions for it too, each bringing extra cards, but also having their own unique features: Crisis, in which disasters keep occurring (a little bit like global events in Turmoil) and players have to work together to deal with them; Discovery, which adds a flavour of milestones and awards; and Foundations, which makes the game a little bigger, facilitating more players (somewhat like the larger maps in Amazonis & Vastitas).
So, if you want more competition, Discovery is the essential expansion; if you prefer solo or cooperative play, it’s Crisis; and if you have a larger game playing group, Foundations.
Also, as with the original game, there are a few promo cards.
Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game swaps resource production for collecting dice. The original game’s production phase gives you more dice to roll, and the payment for cards is sets of dice showing specific faces.
This is trading the luck of the card draw for the luck of dice rolls, which appeals to some folk while putting others off. The increase in randomness is tempered somewhat by one action being the ability to trade one die to change the value of another.
Despite the switch to using dice, this game does feel to me closer in spirit to the original than Ares Expedition does.
The first Dice expansion, Missions is coming soon, though little information is available about it at the moment beyond the teaser video at https://www.facebook.com/100086642261936/videos/645696771770484/.
But Wait, There’s More…
A campaign version of the original game could be hitting Kickstarter soon and a role playing variant is on the horizon, possibly using ideas from the several Terraforming Mars novels—yes, novels—In the Shadow of Deimos, Edge of Catastrophe and Shores of a New Horizon. (I wonder if we should expect to hear about a Terraforming Mars movie…) Fan expansions for these games exist, ranging from extra cards to whole replacement games—the extended board from one stunning example is shown below:
You can design your own cards too—people regularly post custom card ideas to the Terraforming Mars subreddit—and there’s a design tool at https://github.com/SliceOfBread/tm_cardmaker.
And finally, there’s a digital port of the game—thus far, the base game, and Venus Next, Hellas & Elysium and Prelude expansions exist, along with some promo cards. I find this to be quite a reasonable version of the game, and you can play with others remotely or locally, all without having to lay the game out and tidy up after.
Wrap-Up
Despite sharing the name, Terraforming Mars, Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition and Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game are all very different once you get beyond the graphical elements and basic concepts. If you’ve tried the original game, but it doesn’t grab you, the others could be worth a look. If you like card-based games, Ares Expedition is the ticket; if you like dice-based games, then it’s Dice.
And whichever you settle on, don’t forget about all those expansions.
My own preferences are for the original game with the Prelude expansion, or Dice if I need a quick fix. I’m not so keen on Ares Expedition though I can’t quite put my finger on why. If you’ve read my earlier blog post on the subject, you’ll know I’m quite keen on digital versions of some board games, especially for solo play. While the Automa expansion offers decent play with the physical game, it does involve a fair amount of effort—I confess I prefer to play solo on a computer since that’s all taken care of in the form of AI opponents, even though it does mean I’m forgoing the additional corporation and project cards in the expansion. The digital AIs have a different style of play to MarsBot, but they’re good enough for me—and I can have more than one of them in a game.
Clearly, the above is just one opinion, and your tastes are likely to be different.
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts. There have also been papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
