Terraforming Mars

Catching up on game night posts. We played with the super duper “all in” Terraforming Mars gear and finished up In Too Deep. What’s next for Game Night?

I haven’t talked about my recent kickstarter projects, so here’s a bunch of board games, some video games, and some other stuff.

Terraforming Mars has been on the list of top 10 board games since first published in 2016. It’s good, but is it TOO good?

It took us a little over two years to play through the twenty-five scenarios of Jaws of the Lion. But we enjoyed every single one of those twenty five. Covid, real life, and the occasional other game (mostly Terraforming Mars) got in the way of finishing this prequel to Gloomhaven in any reasonable amount of time. Sometimes, months would go by between plays. But we always came back. Our time with Gloomhaven and Jaws of the Lion gave us a reason to come together and just lose ourselves in a world where certain doom seemed to lurk around every new scenario. ...

It’s pronounced DAY-moss. I always feel I need to point that out when someone plays the card in Terraforming Mars that sends Mars’ smaller, outer moon crashing to the ground purely to just raise the temperature by a couple degrees C. It’s actually the closer moon, Phobos (FOE-buss), that’s in danger of crashing to Mars at some point. Phobos orbits so close to Mars that it actually appears to be moving backward in the sky. ...

I’d love to travel as much as this game has travelled. Poland (not Portugal), Germany, all over the Eastern USA… Can’t wait to play it! Star Scrappers Orbital I’ll have more to write about it once we get it into a game night…!

It’s that time of the month when I pull out the old atlas and scour the world for my Kickstarter projects! Where could they be this month??? Let’s find out together! Star Scrappers Orbital First up is Star Scrappers Orbital, a game designed by the same fella that designed Terraforming Mars, a game that we have had hundreds of hours of fun playing – it’s right up there with the top board games I have ever played, and a purchase I never regret. It’s described as an “engine building, worker placement” game, which only means that it’s made in Europe, where they love that kind of stuff. This game is being shipped to me from Portugal, and is currently sitting somewhere in a warehouse in Köln, waiting for a jet to the USA, I assume. It’s scheduled to arrive next week, sometime. ...

Terraforming Mars, the big box game by FryxGames, is a long-time favorite board game at our kitchen table. As the name implies, it’s a game about making Mars habitable by humans. But, what if Terraforming Mars, but a fast-paced card game? That’s Ares Expedition. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition shares a lot of elements with the board game. There’s a board representing Mars, divided into hexes. Players represent corporations building generation-long projects, which are cards in both games. Players have their own player boards, on which they track wealth and resources. What’s changed? ...

Quick recap: Terraforming Mars is one of the most popular board games in the world right now, and has been for years. It’s a game not just about about terraforming Mars, but eventually exploring and colonizing our Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets’ larger moons through several expansions. The game play remains mostly the same, though, through expansions – you research activities to help with the terraforming (or to hinder your opponents) by buying cards; you play those cards in the action phase; you then receive a payment from the faceless Terraforming Council based on your contribution to the terraforming, plus whatever income your research projects provide. ...

Back in the Before Times, when we only had a small number of board games, Game Night would rotate between Magic the Gathering, Vast and Terraforming Mars. Now we have dozens of games to play, but Terraforming Mars is still on our rotation. When the local game store opened as part of Connecticut’s post-pandemic reopening, I went there (masked, of course) looking for the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars. (We’d heard there were spaceships. SPACE. SHIPS.) They didn’t have it, but they did have another expansion we’d missed, Turmoil. ...