Mars Probe

Terraforming Mars is one of the top 5 board games, according to BoardGameGeek. I had played it before -- but quite some time ago, in a flurry with a bunch of other games. I didn't set down any thoughts about it at the time, and then didn't play it again, so it didn't really stick. When I recently revisited it, I resolved to think more carefully about what it is that so many gamers love here.

You can guess from the title what Terraforming Mars is about. Players are collectively trying to bring to the red planet enough oxygen, vegetation, and heat to sustain human life... while playing a corporation that's trying to carve out the biggest and best piece of the new frontier for itself. There are a lot of elements at play here that, if stripped down to their most abstract level, you'll find in lots of other board games: most significantly resource collection and management, territory expansion, and card drafting.

There's a large deck of cards with unique abilities you can tap, upgrades you can play, and more. You get to look at several of these each turn to potentially draw into your hand, but you must pay for each card you want to keep. From a design standpoint, this means the deck can contain cards that only work well early and others that only work well late; they'll all have a place in the game because you simply don't have to buy them for your hand if they're outside their window of impact. From a player perspective, it creates this interesting Goldilocks situation in your hand where "options are good," but "too many options means you overpaid." Managing the right split between your hand of cards and your finances is an important skill to master in the game.

Another interesting "can you time this right?" mechanic involves one of the ways scoring happens at the end of the game. There are five possible categories that can be scored, though only three are selected for any given playthrough. And players actually select those during the game, by paying resources to choose one of the ways they want scoring to go. Make this move too early, and you let your opponents know exactly what they need to focus on to beat you. Make it too late, and the price to select a scoring condition goes way up... assuming a choice is even still available.

These strategic considerations, along with multiple resources to manage and a fistful of cards all competing for your attention does make for a fun puzzle. Plus, there's a lot of interaction with other players, as the spaces they take on the map force you to rethink your plans on the fly. There are also several "take that" cards you can aim at other players to cost them resources; these I could do without, but they aren't so prevalent to truly sour me on the game.

One aspect that does sour me, though, is the method of tracking your resources. In a half-dozen different categories, you have a tiny cube on a personal playmat that's used to track your income each turn, plus a nearby spot on the map where that income is banked from turn to turn until you spend it. The resources themselves are abstract cubes of sizes representing 1s, 5s, and 10s, with shiny metal-looking finishes to fit the game's theme. But this finish makes them slick as can be as they rest on your playmat... or rather, as they slide halfway across your playmat every time someone so much as grazes the table. I'm skeptical that anyone, anywhere has ever completed a game of Terraforming Mars without any player ever having their resources knocked askew at least once. Frankly, if the game weren't otherwise enjoyable, this would almost be a dealbreaker.

I don't have nearly the experience with Terraforming Mars that many gamers do, but I think at this point I'd like to play more. I'd say right now, I'd give it about a B+... but with room to trend up (if that resource thing doesn't just drive me bonkers in subsequent games). If you're a gamer-type reading my blog, the odds are you've played the game yourself. But on the off-chance you haven't: if you like strategic resource management games, you should check this one out.