Two years after the release of Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, its first expansion is coming; Missions is due to appear next month. FryxGames says: ‘Return to the Red Planet and find new ways to terraform. This expansion introduces a new dice color representing influence, purple dice with special effects. With new corporations, new project cards, but especially a new mission mechanic that boosts player interaction, this expansion gives new life to an already loved game.’
Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game lives within the family of Terraforming Mars games, but is quite different to the original, trading card-based strategy gameplay for the luck of dice rolls. It’s a much quicker and simpler game, but retains all the theming of Terraforming Mars.
Not much is known about the new expansion beyond a teaser video, but the contents of the box are:
- 10 influence dice
- 43 mission cards
- 6 dice tiles
- 2 objectives
- 2 special tiles
- 27 project cards
- 9 corporations
- 2 bonus cards
- 12 player cubes
The expansions primary new features come through in the first two on that list. Influence appears to be a slimmed down variant of the same concept in the original game’s Turmoil expansion, having the same connotations of diplomacy and politics. In practice, the purple influence dice behave as an additional resource type which can be used with some of the new project cards.
Missions are akin to smaller forms of milestones in the original Terraforming Mars, in that each one provides a specific goal (e.g., place a certain number of cities) in order to gain extra Victory Points. Because the available missions are visible to all players, everyone is
racing to complete them. The increased the interaction and competition between players addresses something perhaps lacking a little in the base Terraforming Mars: Dice, where players come fairly close to running solo games beside each other.
Where they don’t directly interoperate with influence or missions, the remainder of the additions add a welcome sprinkle of variety to the collections of project cards, corporations, etc. of the base game.
Overall, as with the expansions to Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, this one adds a flavour of concepts that already exist in the original Terraforming Mars or its expansions, but in a form nicely matched to the playing style of the smaller game.
If you’re a fan of Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, you’re sure to like the new features in Missions.
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.
