If you’re familiar with Terraforming Mars, be aware that Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is a very different game; on the other hand, if you’re new to the Terraforming Mars world, some aspects of Ares Expedition will make little sense without the context of the original! Branching out from their existing and very successful IP, FryxGames migrated concepts from Terraforming Mars into further games with the same look and feel, but radically different mechanisms: Ares Expedition as well as Terraforming Mars: the Dice Game, a topic for a different article. For those who have come across Ark Nova and Sanctuary, it’s a bit like the relationship between them: the game family shares art styles, iconography and a few game concepts, but that’s all.
The aim of just about all the Terraforming Mars games is to increase your terraform rating (TR)—scoring points, essentially—while increasing oxygen, temperature and ocean parameters to, well, terraform Mars. Ares Expedition does this via cards, with the main player board being almost vestigial: it could easily be replaced by a stack of ocean tiles and 3 tracks, for temperature, oxygen and terraform rating. Unlike Terraforming Mars, there’s no area control on the map, and no the notion of scoring placement bonuses.
Project and Corporation Cards
The game revolves around playing project cards to gain various resources directly or indirectly. These cards come in 3 flavours:
· production cards (green)—increase the amount of resources you receive during the production phase (see later for an explanation of phases); Vesta Shipyard in the picture above increases titanium production by 1;
· action/effect cards (blue)—action cards provide abilities to be used during the action phase, and effect cards trigger when something specific happens; Livestock above is an effect card triggered by a rise in temperature, when you add a cube to the card (to represent an animal); and
· event cards (red)—have an immediate effect when played; Plantation grants you 2 forests and an oxygen increase.
Each card has a mega-credit (MC) cost in the top left corner, which you have to pay to play the card, and a number of tag icons below that. These tags, which should be recognisable to Terraforming Mars players, don’t do anything by themselves, but may be referenced by other cards; their precise meaning isn’t all that important, as long as you can match icons.
A card may display a requirement just to the bottom right of the cost, which is explained in words towards the bottom of the card—e.g., Livestock can only be played if the oxygen level is high enough, or Plantation requires that you must have played cards having a total of at least 4 science tags on them.
A few cards include a victory point (VP) score, e.g. Vesta Shipyard, which will be added on to your TR at the end of the game. Some of these are marked with an asterisk, meaning their final VP value depends on resources you’ve collected, cubes on the card in the case of Livestock. Note that VP and TR are separate concepts, though both contribute to your final score.
Corporation cards are sort of specialised projects, giving your starting conditions, such as your initial amount of MC and possibly other resources—27 MC and 1 plant production in the case of Ecoline, shown at the right of the picture above—as well as any special abilities, the cost of transforming plant production into forests being discounted for Ecoline.
The other type of card in the game, phase cards, will be described in the Turn Structure section.
Setup
Set out the main board, placing the 9 ocean tiles, randomly shuffled, face down on the board. (Really, a simple stack would do!) Put the transparent cube markers at the start of the oxygen and temperature scales. Place the phase tiles by the board, but really, only if you can be bothered, since they add next to nothing to the gameplay.
Each player takes a player board, the 5 action cards of one colour and all the cubes of the same colour, placing cubes at the start of the resource tracks on the player board, and one at 5 on the main board’s TR track. (Why 5? I’m sure there’s a good reason…)
On the resource tracks, cards, steel and titanium indicate directly how much of that resource you have. (In a change from Terraforming Mars, you don’t produce steel and titanium, but the track itself provides the current value, and you don’t move the markers back down the tracks as you ‘spend’ these resources.)
For MC, temperature and plant resources the tracks on the left determine how much of the resource you will gain during the production phase, when cubes will be added to the spaces on the right to indicate how much you have available to spend. Use the copper, silver and gold-coloured cubes to indicate 1, 5 and 10 units respectively.
Shuffle the project cards and deal each player 8, placing the rest in a face down draw deck. The rulebook suggests that for your first game, you instead separate out all the project cards with a star at the bottom right and give players 4 of those, placing any left over in a discard pile (note that cards should always be discarded face down); then deal out 4 more cards from the remaining project deck.
Shuffle the corporation cards and deal each player a pair, from which they will select one. All remaining corporation cards are placed back in the box. As with project cards, the rulebook suggests giving players one of the star-marked corporations to play with instead. An ‘advanced’ rule is, after corporations have been chosen, to let players discard any number of their dealt project cards, replacing them with ones drawn from the deck.
Players then receive whatever resources are indicated on their chosen corporation card, and the game can begin.
Aside: like base Terraforming Mars, Ares Expedition can take a bit of time to ramp up, with a first few dull rounds of resource gathering. Where Terraforming Mars has a Prelude expansion to jumpstart the game, Ares Expedition doesn’t, but that hasn’t stopped Charles Braddard from coming up with something prelude-like, where before play starts, players are given several production project cards (or the starred project cards mentioned above) and can choose to spend some of their MC play them immediately, boosting subsequent production phases. You can find all the details on BoardGameGeek. (He’s also provided a more sophisticated variant with its own cards, but I’ll leave you to read about that.)
Turn Structure
There are 5 different actions, one or more of which each player will perform on a turn. Players can take their actions more or less simultaneously—there may be contention for some resources, but player interaction is fairly lightweight. Because the word ‘action’ has so many conflicting meanings, these are referred to (somewhat confusingly, I think) as ‘phases’ in the game. The phases are Development, Construction, Action, Production and Research, and will always be carried out in that order, but not all may be present in any given turn—that’s because…
The first thing each player does is termed planning, selecting one of their 5 phase cards and placing it face down in front of them, to indicate which phase they would like to participate in. You can’t select the same phase as you did on the previous turn, so it’s really selecting one from 4 after the first turn. (The rulebook suggests the way to do this is to leave the previous round’s selected phase card face up until after choosing the current round’s, then adding it back into your hand.)
One everyone has made their choice, reveal all the cards. The chosen phases will be the only ones invoked during this turn—the phase tiles that I disparaged earlier are intended to be used to show this, but that feels like unnecessary work, since the phase cards themselves are all plainly visible.
Next, everyone performs actions pertinent to the visible phases, in the order mentioned earlier—the cards are all numbered to make this easy. The phase card colours can also help you identify the project cards you can use during each particular phase. The phases are:
· development—play one production card (green) from your hand, as long as its requirements are satisfied, paying its MC cost and then moving the marker up the relevant production track on your player board;
· construction—play one action or event card (blue or red), with events taking place immediately, and actions being available for use in the action phase;
· action—perform any number of actions on your played action cards, some of which may have additional costs; you can use each action card in this way only once between production phases, and the way to indicate this is to rotate the card 90° when you activate it, rotating it back during production; you can also invoke ‘standard actions’ as many times as you want, spending MC, plants or heat (more on that in a moment);
· production—this is where you gain MC to the sum of your TR plus MC production value, and cards, heat and plants according to the values on the tracks on the player board; and
· research—draw 2 cards from the deck, keeping one and discarding the other.
(You may be wondering why you’d use the research phase when production gains cards too… Your card production track starts at zero, and there aren’t that many opportunities to increase it, so research may be a significant option until you’ve managed to get that track up a couple of notches.)
At the bottom of each phase card is an additional bonus which you will receive if you were the person (or one of the people) to pick that phase during planning. For example, during development, you get a 3 MC discount on the card you play, or you can draw more cards during research.
Any time during your turn, you can discard a card from your hand to gain 3 MC, which can help pay for cards you play. On the topic of paying, steel and titanium resources can be used as discounts for building and space cards, as shown by the icons above those tracks on the player board.
The standard actions you can perform during the action phase include spending MC at your discretion to get a forest, flip an ocean or to raise temperature. However, spending plants (to gain forests) or heat (to increase the Mars temperature) is mandatory (unlike in Terraforming Mars) up until the related terraforming parameter has reached its limit.
The way temperature, oxygen and oceans, not to mention forests and cities, is different to that in Terraforming Mars, too. In fact, there are no city tiles at all. Oceans are the only tile on the map, and when you ‘place’ an ocean, all you’re doing is picking one of those tiles and turning it face up, taking whatever bonus is indicated. (Have I mentioned the irrelevance of the map!?) You will also gain a TR.
When you place a forest, you take a forest tile into your player area—these indicate a single VP which will be added to your score at the end. (There are larger 5 VP forest tiles, for which you can trade 5 singletons in to reduce clutter.) As long as the oxygen scale isn’t at the top, you also increase oxygen a step and gain a TR. An important point here is that you will still gain the VP from a forest even if you place it after oxygen has hit its limit, just not the TR.
When increasing temperature, as long as the limit has not yet been reached, you move the temperature marker up a notch and gain a TR.
(If temperature or oxygen increase for any other reason, such as caused by playing a particular card, you’ll gain TR as appropriate, as long as the parameters haven’t reached their maximum.)
Because the game assumes simultaneous play, it could be that several people will cause the terraforming parameters to increase during their turn. If they ever reach maximum during that flow, subsequent players will still get the applicable rewards for that turn only. E.g., if player 1 places the final ocean, and player 2 also performs an action to place an ocean, player 2 will still receive the TR and whatever the reward on that tile was. To repeat, this is only for the current turn, and no rewards will be given in future turns.
Game End
The game end is triggered when all three terraforming parameters have reached their limits. Once the phase that occurred in completes, the game ends immediately—all further phases in that turn are ignored. The rulebook drops a rather strong hint that if the game ends during the action phase, it’s a good idea to perform whatever VP scoring actions you can, including spending MC (remembering to trade in otherwise useless cards in your hand for MC) on forests for their VP value.
Your total score is your current TR, along with VP from forest tiles you possess as well as the VP values marked on played cards. Ties are broken based on how many resources you have on your player board (so don’t forget to trade in any cards left in your hand).
Solo and Cooperative
Solo play is a simple beat-your-own-high-score game running over 25 turns. Place an additional token at 1 on the TR track to count rounds. (Is this why human players start at 5?)
Your ‘opponent’ plays a hand of 5 phase cards, shuffled and placed face down. The top card is revealed and processed during each turn, until all 5 have been used. At this point, shuffle the phase cards and form a new draw deck, then move the round token up a step. Once it reaches 5, you’re allowed to choose the order in which phase your opponent selects phases instead of relying on the luck of the draw, and the game ends after 5 more turns.
Other than that, you play as normal, and have won the game if Mars is fully terraformed (i.e., all terraforming parameters at their maximum) at the end of those 25 rounds, with VP counting as your score.
The rulebook offers a suggestion for varying the difficulty of solo play: novice mode, in which you increase either oxygen or temperature 2 steps after moving the round counter; advanced, increasing them by a single step; and expert, with no increases.
An equally uninspired 2-player cooperative mode is also specified in the rulebook. Here, you use 30 cubes to time the play, 27 copper ones and 3 of an unused player colour. On each turn, after the chosen phases have been revealed, each player takes one of the cubes: if you take a copper one, add it to your MC; if you take one of the others, you can swap a project card in your hand for one in your partner’s. The game finishes at the end of the turn where the last cube was taken, and since there are 2 players, that means it’s a 15-turn game.
Communication between players is encouraged, stopping just short of telling each other what cards you have in your hand, presumably in an attempt to avoid quarterbacking.
If you’ve terraformed the planet and score at least 80 VP between you, it’s a win, otherwise you both lose. Again, there’s a beat-your-high-score aspect to this.
Crises Everywhere
Because the solo and cooperative play modes are so dull in the base game, I thought it worth mentioning Ares Expedition: Crisis, an expansion designed specifically for 1–4 player cooperative play (though BoardGameGeek visitors reckon it plays best as a solo game.
The story here is that Mars has been successfully colonised (terraforming parameters all at the top of the scale), and your team is working to keep the planet habitable. Every round, a ‘crisis card’ is drawn which gives you a goal for that round; if you fail to deal with it properly, one or more terraforming parameters will fall.
Crisis cards show an effect that happens every turn as well as an immediate effect; for Emergency Shelters, shown above, the immediate effect is to swap cards with other players and decrease temperature, and the persistent effect is to decrease both temperature and oxygen. They also have a goal to achieve in order to deal with the crisis; in this case play cards having building tags. The final point of interest is the number of crisis tokens to add to the card when it’s drawn—this represents the number of times the goal has to be resolved to ultimately remove the card—3 times for Emergency Shelters.
Note also the tier level and player count in the bottom right (Emergency Shelters is a tier 3, level 1 card).
The expansion includes an all but identical replacement map (the coloured zones on the parameter tracks are spaced differently), though it does have an easier to read reverse side, shown above. During setup, you place the parameter markers at the top of their tracks, and ocean tiles on the board blue face up. The base game ocean tiles are replaced with double-sided ones here, such that if an ocean is removed as the result of a crisis event (a heck of a catastrophe, if it evaporated a whole ocean!), its reverse is revealed which shows the rewards to be gained when players create the ocean again. This additional visibility means, when a crisis causes you to turn over an ocean tile, you can choose the one giving you the ‘best’ reward when you turn it back, and not forget which tile it was later on!
Remove (or ignore, if they’re drawn) project cards with temperature, ocean and oxygen requirements from the deck, along with a few others, as specified on page 2 of the rulebook. Choose crisis cards according to your player count and split them into tier levels. Place the tier 5 cards face down, with the single tier 4 card on top, then all but 2 of the tier 2 cards, and all but 2 of the tier 2, and finally, all but one of the tier 1 cards at the top of the pile. The rulebook suggests adding the 3 tier 0 cards for an easier game.
For 2–4 players, you use the ‘dummy’ phase cards (the left pair in the picture above) for your common ‘opponent,’ removing the action phase card for 3 or 4; when playing solo, use the solo mode cards (on the right above) instead; these show two different phases, and you get to choose which to use during play.
The game is similar to base Ares Expedition, except that at the start of your turn, you first check the current metrics: if oxygen or temperature markers are in the yellow or red zones on their parameter tracks, or the ocean count falls within the ranges printed at the bottom of the board, you place out the matching detriment tile shown in the earlier crisis cards picture—these subject you to additional turn penalties, such as increased card costs. Worse, if any of the parameters are in the purple regions, the game’s over and you lose.
Next, resolve crisis cards currently in play (i.e., degrade whatever parameters are stated as the card’s persistent effect), and draw a new crisis card, resolving its immediate effects (but not the persistent ones) and adding crisis tokens as indicated. If this causes any parameter to enter the purple zone, you don’t lose immediately, but you will need to increase that parameter before the start of the next round.
After this, draw a card from the dummy hand (in solo mode, draw 2 and choose which phase on each you want to use).
Then players act as in normal Ares Expedition, with planning followed by performing selected phases. When you gain VP (e.g., by gaining a forest), the points instead go into a communal ‘VP bank’ on the crisis board; these points can be used to avert crises.
If during your turn, you hit one of the revealed crisis goals, remove a crisis token from the card; if the card is now empty, remove it from play. At the end of a turn, you can spend pairs of VP from the bank to remove further tokens.
Besides being in the purple zone at the beginning of a turn, the game will end if any parameter falls off the end of its scale or the crisis deck is empty when you come to draw a card—these are all losing conditions.
The tier 4 card (shown in the picture above) signals the endgame; if you can fully (re)terraform the planet before running out of crisis cards, you win.
Crisis is a complex and difficult (if you want a harder game still, the rulebook has some suggestions for you), but I find it to be much more satisfying than the base cooperative/solo efforts.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, 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.
