Terraforming Mars

I need to get the player boards out of the way first because they colored my whole first dozen plays. You track your production and resources by sliding cubes along single-layer printed tracks, and every single group I’ve played with has bumped a sleeve or an elbow into that board at least once a session and had to reconstruct someone’s economy from memory. For a box in this price bracket, that’s a real miss, and it’s not just me grumbling, it’s the single most repeated complaint I’ve seen from other players too. A double-layered board would have solved this on day one and it still hasn’t happened in the base game.

That gripe aside, the actual engine is genuinely special. You’re a corporation racing to raise Mars’s temperature, oxygen, and ocean coverage while building out your own tableau of unique project cards, and the way those two goals, the shared planetary meters and your private corporate engine, pull against and occasionally align with each other is the smartest part of the design. Milestones and awards give the midgame real teeth, since only three of each can be claimed and the race for them turns an otherwise heads-down solitaire experience into something with actual tension.

And that’s the other honest caveat: this leans multiplayer solitaire more than the theme wants you to admit. At two players it sings, fast, tight, genuinely reactive. Push it to five and you’re watching everyone quietly build their own machine while you wait your turn, and the game does noticeably drag the higher you climb the player count. I’ve had four-hour sessions that felt every bit as long as they were, and I’ve had tight two-player games that flew by in ninety minutes and left me wanting another round immediately.

The theme, for what it’s worth, earns its keep, Kim Stanley Robinson fans will recognize the flavor even if this trades his political philosophy for straightforward engine-building math. It’s not the leanest design on my shelf and the components undersell what’s actually happening on the cards, but the corporation-vs-planet tension is real, and it’s exactly why this one’s stayed on my shelf through multiple purges of games that didn’t earn their space.