If you’ve seen me elsewhere on the blog, you’ll be aware that I’m a fan of Terraforming Mars, both the physical game as well as the digital one. One thing that lets the digital version down, though, is the lack of expansions; I believe Prelude, the most recent one, appeared on Steam in 2020, so my expectation for any new digital Terraforming Mars material was a nice round zero. However, what do I see on Steam today? Colonies is coming to the PC and mobile versions of the game in the first quarter of 2026.
I find Colonies to be one of the less exciting expansions, but it’s still a useful one to have. It adds, well, colonies—these are entities you can either trade with (exchanging money, energy or titanium for other resources) or build on (gaining a benefit afterwards when people trade with them), or both. There’s a lot more to it, as its review explains, but that’s the core novel feature. Terraforming Mars’ primary mechanism is drawing and playing project cards to terraform the planet and gain resources, and if you get a bad run of cards, you can end up lagging badly. With this expansion, you can pop along to one of the new colonies and trade to get the resources you need, unblocking you somewhat. As I said, not very exciting, but useful.
The Colonies DLC gives you a new screen in the digital game, as shown above, displaying the selected colonies with their current resource and bonus levels, and where players’ ships are (this is a screengrab from a solo game, hence there’s just a single ship, the blue triangle in the centre).
Playing with the expansion is easy: there’s a new standard project to build on a colony and a new action to perform a trade once per generation. And that’s it. (Well, there are a few extra project and corporation cards too—can never have too many of those!) The game engine looks after the trade and bonus bookkeeping as well as the solar phase, and interacts appropriately with any other DLC you might have.
Colonies is currently running in public beta, so if you have Terraforming Mars on your PC or phone, you can give it a test drive right now.
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 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see this link for a full list). 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.
