Our review

Tranformation of a planeT

Terraforming Mars

Mars is made habitable

Mark Watney, the character in the film „Der Marsianer“, would have been rather pleased with the terraforming operations put into action by up to five players to make the Red Planet habitable; he himself did only plant a few potatoes and made a few drives in his Mars Rover to survive for about one and a half years on our planetary neighbor. In Terraforming Mars, however, we do not speak of years, but of generations that are necessary to turn Mars into an environment in which humans can live.

Essential for such a transformation are three global parameters – Temperature (starts at -30 degrees Celsius and ends at +8 degrees), the Oxygen Content of the atmosphere (in the range of 0 to 14%) and the number of used ocean tiles (9 tiles); as soon as all parameters have reached the threshold value or as soon as all ocean tiles have been used up, the game ends immediately after the current generation.

Mars is spread out before us, represented by a board of 100 hexagonal cases for tiles – cities, open spaces, oceans and special tiles. Some of the cases show small placement bonuses – special actions or various revenues; the board also features the indicator tracks for temperature and oxygen values and further more the so-called milestone and award indicators and a summary of the standard projects that are always available for all players.

Each player – we are corporations – has his own player board to mirror the production and resources value of six resources – money, steel, titanium, plants, energy and heat. Money has the only production value that can fall below zero, well that’s money, it does not work any differently on Mars. Depending on the variant we choose to play we either begin with fixed, pre-set production values and money or use the values on the corporation cards. Projects cards are, with the actions they provide, are the core of the game – we start the game with 10 in hand, in the advanced version we must pay 3 money units for a card to be able to keep it.

Each player beings at 20 on the Terraforming Value track (TW), which equals the basic money income at the end of each generation. Furthermore, this TW is part of the victory points at the end of the game; each raise of one of the global parameters by a player also raises the TW of this player by one.

In your first game, you are more or less overwhelmed by the texts and options provided by the project cards – they come in three different types; with some experience in the game it gets easier and easier to use the cards properly and even create combinations for lots of points or resources. Fresh supplies of those cards arrive in the research phase of each generation. You can buy up to four randomly assigned cards for 3 money units each.

In the subsequent action phase, each player can execute one or two actions or pass. This is repeated until all players have passed. I pass on explanations of various side actions, however important they might be, for instance „8 plants for a greenery tile“ or „8 heat for a raise in temperature“, and begin immediately with the first and most important of the main actions, “play a card from hand”. Each card has a condition that must be met if you want to build the card, that is, place it on the table – foremost the price between 1 and 36 money units, but for many of the cards you must also take into consideration a minimum or maximum value of oxygen percentage or temperature or the number of ocean tiles already on the board or a few other small necessities. This twist makes it possible not to overstress players from the start, but force them into long-term planning – the card, for instance, can only be played when the temperature has risen to a minimum of 0 degrees – and also to force them to think about the usefulness of having a card in hand that you will not be able to play before the second half of the game.

Frequently played are cards that enable you to place a tile on Mars, which is the core of terraforming anyway, or to play cards on the table that have a fixed or variable victory points value.  The green cards have a once-only effect – the consume, for instance, resources once, but enhance the resources production at the same time, which of course makes long-term sense.

Blue cards have, besides a once-only-effect, also a permanent effect, for instance more favorable conditions for various actions, or the offer an option for exchange once per generation, which is also considered to be an action or offer a layout action on the card itself.

Cards carrying a building symbol can also be paid for with Steel in a ratio 2:1; cards carrying the space symbol have a titan ratio of 3:1, so that you can pay for a Space card with 3 Titan and 1 money unit. There are also some, albeit few, destructive card

Another one of the main actions is to claim a milestone; you must pay 8 money units for it and comply with a condition, for instance have three of your own city tiles on mars or three of your own open space tiles or have eight cards laid out on the table carrying the building symbol. Only three of the five milestones can be claimed, each one only once, and each claimed milestone, gives you five victory points. So, in this case, the motto is that the early bird gets the worm.

The situation is a bit different with the action „ finance award“ – for this action you need not meet a condition, but there are also only three out of five awards available. At the end of the game, all players have the chance to win the awards – five points for the first and two points for the second player, not only the player who paid for the award. This situation demands that you are able to realize if you will really be able to meet the condition of having most of your own tiles on Mars, or the highest money production, or most steel and titan resources at the end of the game and to be sure that this award cannot be snatched away at the last minute by another player, dropping you into the less point-awarding second place or even out of the scoring.

Let me talk about the standard action in brief. They basically offer all what the cards offer for basic action, with the difference that they are permanently available, albeit at a higher cost; for instance, selling any number of cards for one money unit each, raise temperature on Mars, place an ocean tile or build a city and to raise your money production by one at the same time.

At the end of each generation each player receives as many resources as equals the current resource production on his player board; do not forget to use the basic revenue of the TW for money. And we begin the next generation, because we are not done with Mars for quite some time.

To sum up all this in a nutshell, let me say that Terraforming Mars surely is one of the outstanding games of this vintage, as regards to topic as well as regards to mechanisms. The multitude of action cards, which even provide cards for beginners as well as additional cards for an advanced version (Era of the Corporations) leaves nothing to be desired and provides lots of variation in many a game. I look forward already to the expansions, because those will arrive for sure, even if they only be new cards. The basically rather simple course of a round contributes to a feeling of being at home on Mars rather quickly. The rules leave no question unanswered, and this on barely 20 pages. A mentioning of the fact, that a generation goes in circles without end, giving each player 1 or 2 actions in every go-around, ending only when all have passed, would have been helpful; some groups overlooked this rule and did not play correctly.

Gert Stöckl

Players: 1-5

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: Jacob Fryxelius

Artist: Daniel und Isaac Fryxelius

Price: ca. 50 Euro

Publisher: Schwerkraft Verlag 2016

Web: www.schwerkraft-verlag.de

Genre: Settlement, development

Users: For experts

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: de en pl

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Lots of cards

Therefore, lots of options

Easily accessible, astonishingly simple flow of the game

One of the outstanding games of 2016

Compares to:

Agricola for number of cards and many options, other settlement and development games

Other editions:

Schwerkraft Verlag (de), Rebel.pl (pl)

My rating: 7

Gert Stöckl:

Mars! Here we come! In this game, at least, we have settled you already!

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0