Comments on: Why Is Terraforming Mars So Popular? A Pseudo-Review

By: CombatMist

CombatMist — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 03:17:09 +0000

I had heard good things and was excited to play TM. 1st game I even got 2nd place and would have been 1st if not for a luck tile swap card final round. I did like the tile building and would have liked more of that.Play length was very long and in part to over complicating the entire game in every way.

I came in with very high expectations and felt let down in every major way. I have issues with every major mechsnic.

It’s like a massive engine being stalled by a small monkey wrench. In this case many and in every mechanism. Some slow down to grind through them and keep going and others halt all together. It’s like they refused to reduce the complexity or content by 20%.

Since the pandemic one if my containment projects was making my own game. After 1 year I saw issues that were not resolving. After 2 years and over 50 play thoughts I knew I could not move forward unless I fixed a major part. It was a painful gut punch. I needed to reduce the resources from 5 to 4. 5 was overly complicated and unnecessary and harder to explain the minor differences. I spent the last 6 months dissolving 1 resource and either removing its use redistributing its uses to others. After it was done felt like I cleaned a hoarder house. Everything was clean and worked so much better.

TM needs to reduce from 6 to 4-5 resources. This will almost only help the game in every way. Including cost, time to play, time ti learn, components and objectives.

Similar issue with 2nd resources. Just too many. Combine or eliminate some. Also issue if several things as microbes and animals were almost completely worthless. They are both the most rare and have the weakest and least uses. That is a triple fail for balance.

Cards costs varied from like 1-40. That’s absolutely insane. Only yugioh can play that game of such a wide number range and it has issues of 0-4000 power where you literally need to keep track of your like life total on a calculator. I didnt mind paying for cards in TM issue was some cards are literally not playable past certain terraforming stages. So you can scrap them for like 1 but you paid 3. Again huge fail. It should still do something even if 1/2 effect.

TM has potential but 0 balance.

By: Marco

Marco — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 09:36:31 +0000

I agree with most of what you say, except for one point: TM is not a a multiplayer solitaire. If you want to win you need to read into the other players’ game, especially to time buying milestones and awards. The problem that is misunderstood as low player interaction is simply that it has is that it has a huge downtime, since there is absolutely nothing you can do in other people’s turns, except looking at them while they are summing numbers in their heads (I find this massively boring). Yet you need to look at how the game is at the beginning of your turn and see what they are most likely going to do in their next turn.
I think that the core issue here is another. While it looks like a euro game, in reality TM is an ameritrash. The fiddliness, the complication (not complexity), the very large numbers, the very many cubes make you feel like you are doing something really clever and important and can feel exciting (like killing 12 zombies with a bazooka), while in reality the game is pretty shallow. I think that the real answer to why it is so popular is because it is the ameritrash of engine builders.
Ameritrash games are pretty popular (I enjoy some of them, even though I prefer very thinky euros), so it should not be a surprise that TM is popular. People just need to accept that not every engine builder needs to be a euro. I credit TM for breaking this taboo.
Said that, I also don’t like TM 😀

By: Seretha

Seretha — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 06:54:03 +0000

I appreciated this review. Every time I have played TM, I have enjoyed it less. In my first play through I thought I got the gist of the mechanics, but subsequently, I felt I understood it less and less. It does feel like too many mechanics stuffed into one engine, and its unclear whether you are doing anything “right”. Probs wouldn’t matter too much if it weren’t also super long with too nuance–all the different rules become a nightmare (for me) to keep track of. I also felt you had to memorize a wide variety of cards to do well, and that’s just not fun for me, although the group i play with really enjoy it.

By: Aymon

Aymon — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 14:54:29 +0000

I had a pizza with the creater of this game yesterday 🙂

By: iisltd

iisltd — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 20:16:16 +0000

I really like Terraforming Mars, and have played it quite a bit. I agree with many of your criticisms of it, though I also want to point out that the alternate card-drafting rules have made the game waaaay more fun and strategically viable in the long-term. Deciding when it makes sense to draft a card you don’t want to buy to prevent another player from getting it, versus advancing your own strategy by drafting cards to buy yourself, makes for much more interactive and engaging gameplay, while also being less random in outcome.

On the other hand if players are new to the game that means that it could easily double the playtime, so it’s more for games where everyone has played at least once. Even better with a group of players who also have drafted MTG in the past, so they’re used to drafting and go faster.

By: Jakub

Jakub — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 20:58:23 +0000

I was impressed during my first two games. After that it went down the hill.
I feel and understand all of the criticism in this text.
Looks like On Mars could fill the space I have created selling TM last month 🙂

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 11 May 2021 01:55:45 +0000

Thanks for articulating what I could not identify. My play group played this game, it took 4 hours. and everyone was bored and irritated for the last 45 minutes. We were left wondering how such a highly rated game could be so drab. We concluded its lack of interaction, the so called multiplayer solitaire, was the downfall for us. We made the assumption that many board game geeks, especially those who would be attracted to a Mars themed game, would be introverts who would relish the large number of decisions and distractions without having to use any of the diplomacy skills that my play group thrive on while gaming.

By: Alfy Burger

Alfy Burger — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 11:00:11 +0000

Fantastic article. Disclaimer: I seriously dislike this game despite having tried it many times in an effort to partake with my friends.

Terraforming Mars is a game that goes wide, really wide, but never offers any corresponding depth. It has engine building, tableau building, tile laying, 6 ressources, more stuff than some of the heaviest euros out there, yet it steadfastly refuses to interlink all these mechanics properly. Instead, it forces you fo doing a little bit of everything through 3 completely separate objectives that amount to “terraforming Mars”.

The lack of any transformative element is almost disturbing. Most of your ressources work in isolation from the others, and you barely need to make any effort to transform your investments into both points and more ressources for your engine. In fact, I would say the way improving your terraforming score brings you both a victory point and an additional credit per turn is the biggest sin of this game: it never actually makes you work at building an engine. It’s more akin to a “bucket game” similar to the Civilization video games: you invest in a production, it fills a bucket turn by turn, and when the bucket is full, you get a reward and some dopamine.

This leads to very automatic decisions, as you are mostly evaluating the basic return on investment of your actions. I am not saying you will not have difficult choices to make at times, but they are too few and far between for a two-hours game. This applies to several aspects of the game. The tile laying, for one, while not entirely devoid of decisions, remains a very bland exercice.

I do however acknowledge that going wide generates tremendous replayability: you will focus more on a different aspect of the game each time. And the theme is exceptionally well implemented. Neither amount to a great game in my opinion, and its continued popularity bothers me. Any euro designer out there now knows they do not need to come up with satisfying, intricate interactions; a bunch of disparate mechanics and a good theme can get you unparalleled success.

By: Marc Davis

Marc Davis — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 17:13:48 +0000

In reply to cliosboardgames. Thanks! I really didn't expect such a positive response from this article but I'm glad you like it!

By: J. Goard

J. Goard — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 13:20:08 +0000

It’s “accessibility” in precisely the sense you describe is also what has made it particularly vulnerable to another common problem. I had played it just enough to *begin* feeling like my friends and I knew most of the important cards and were starting to gain the first semblance of real strategic competence. And, right at that very point, “right on time” I might say dripping with sarcasm, everybody wanted to be playing with 57 expansions and 4,603,982 more cards.

This is a community that really, really doesn’t want the same long-term experience out of games as I do.