LogFAQs > #933468341

62. Terraforming Mars (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, card-drafting, tile-laying
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 3-4 sessions with 4-5 players (2018-19); one play with expansions
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is a corporation tasked with making Mars more hospitable to human life: increasing oxygen level with trees, increasing the temperature, and filling the oceans. Each age consists of players receiving cards and gaining income, then taking turns performing up to two actions until they all pass out of the age. The game ends in the age when all three terraforming tracks are maxed out.

Design - Terraforming Mars is messy. Its player board is notoriously bad (forcing you to track your income potential, your money, and all your resource counts with personal tracks that are very easily disturbed). The card art isn't particularly consistent.

It's fiddly. There are a bunch of resources to keep track of and mechanics that don't always tie great together and seem to be there mainly for the theme. It's easy to get sucked up in the cards and forget about the actions that are printed on the board as well; you can always pay twenty-five dollars to build a city or something, but you can quickly forget. You have to convert your energy into heat, and it doesn't seem to add anything to the experience except rules overhead and more things that can be disrupted with a bump of the table.

It's long. While in my games people have generally terraformed Mars at a fast rate, it's an engine-builder where games are known to go ages because people are more invested in running their engines than in pushing the endgame by planting trees or raising temperature.

It's random and sometimes mean. Resources are useless without the right type of cards; many cards have different synergies that you need luck to roll into. Occasionally you'll have cards that have a take-that feature in a eurogame that really doesn't need any.

And yet... I kinda like it. It's satisfying when you do string some actions together, and it's fun to hit those bump-lines when you terraform to just the right temperature. And of course there's the theme, which is the real excuse for all the fluff. The chrome in Terraforming Mars is what justifies all the mess - each card, with all its exceptions and garbage attached to it, generally makes sense as to why it behaves the way it does. Like of course you can only have livestock once the temperature reaches a certain degree. Of course predators eat others' animals. Of course a meteor is destructive. Of course you have placement rules for oceans and cities. The theme ties everything together (except possibly the funded awards and buying the cards) and that is great.

Experience - I've played TM a few times and found it good. There's a lot of hype behind the game which eludes me, but while I've never done particularly well, there is something inherently satisfying about competently runninga complex machines. Like hey, I found a way to use this titanium! Or whatever.

Future - It might be worth a few more goes to see if I can actually get any better at evaluating the cards (which seems to be the most important decision point of the game) and just to fill in Mars again. TM is probably a bit high on my list for what I've played of it; however, it could easily justify this ranking or go higher if I were to get a good engine going or to find more of what others love about it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness