Terraforming Mars

Terraforming Mars is the game of my home group. Over a period of several years, I'm comfortable to say we have almost 100 playthroughs of this game and spent the most upgrading this game. We started with the base game, added Prelude, custom corporations/cards, Colonies, Turmoil, and finally Venus. For each of the expansions, I will have a separate review. The beauty of this game is that where there are obviously powerful strategies in the game, you can never force one particular strategy you like. In other words, adaptation is key, and those who adapt end up winning more often than others. I prefer to play this game at 4-5 players because lower player counts tend to run a lot longer, and strategy is just out the window.

The theme of this game is beautiful to say the least. I love the way you play as a corporation and you have to buy projects to play and build your engine. All the keyword/elements in the game make sense thematically and is very much adhere to with the additions of the expansions. However, the artwork is basically photoshop... Switching from from Magic or Stone Maier Games, this game could definitely use some upgrade card artwork.

I didn't particularly like the base components of the game, specifically the player boards. Thankfully I was able to laminate the player boards which made them more usable but still not as functional as the indented boards. Cubes are very small and sitting on the player board we were prone to getting knocked aside causing flying cubes. I highly recommend resolving this issue by getting indented boards. I also highly recommend putting the 300+ cards in sleeves because they will get handled a lot throughout the playthroughs.

What I do enjoy about this game is the sheer number of decisions in the game. Which corporation should you choose? What strategy did you want to go? Should I keep these projects for future generation or should I toss them so I can play some projects earlier. The cumulation of the decisions really make this game fun for me and I'll keep coming back for more. I also love the tag system which is a great mechanic that spans all the expansions. What I do appreciate as well are the cards also have very strict ruling which we very rarely have disputes about.

Overall this game is a must play for anyone that enjoys strategy games. It has many of my favorite mechanics such as engine building, card drafting, area control, politics, and some take that. The theme is very much present during the gameplay which I enjoy.

There are many viable strategies in this game and in this guide I will cover some of my most successful/consistent builds. Now please kindly keep in mind that these strategies work for my intended playstyles and I will do my best to explain my mentality when I pick these strategies. Also an important note I base my strategies mostly depending on my corporation and preludes. These strategies can be mixed and I normal go primary and secondary.

Tier list of corporations ( easy mode)

• City corp

• Colony corp

• Earth tag

• Phobs

• Mining guild

• Viron with one combo

• Heat corp

Tier list of preludes

• Requirement ignore

• Three energy

• Discount card

• Money production

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Jovean Tag - high risk, high reward, needs long game. Depends on early titanium production and well timed unity turmoil.

Heat corp - great when no one is competes with you. Great swing turns when kelvenist win and usually worth to buy extra party members for

Builder - must get some sort of draw engine to work or just divert mix. Draw engine is more import when you have over 5 steel production as you will start over collecting steel. I've had games with 10 production and 40+ steel endgame.

Animal/microbs: this is solely dependent on getting the ignore global prelude as it allows you to stack early. Without that prelude you can go for early cards such as pets, cold fungus (tap for two microbes) and other venus microbes. The draft you want must get at least a point worth of microbes per generation to be worth doing. Nailing a microbes and animal colony is icing on the cake.

Terraforming: this is the aggro play and can be really good counter to ground, jovean, and animal games because of how fast it ends the game. This also synergizes with heatncorps. Usually these build keep event card that raise terraforming, collecting point and production via terraforming. Usually starting with oceans is the fastest as it yield tile returns. Next would be greenies because of the bonus via oceans or green party (which is the party you should go. Maybe kelvin if you get lots of rest production) then objective is to stop the opponent from building their engines. Try not to keep production cards and hard buy standard terraforming if you need to.

Ground game: easily the most points possible. Get energy cards and play cities cards. Collecting tons of money production is preferred so that you can you can build more cities. Try to trifecta your cities in so that greeneries will hit multiple cities. Players will activitely have to block your sheer number of cities with brown tiles. Try to stay in the most open areas and ignore tile bonus because they can be bait. You want to make as many trifecas, if one gets block just place another city creating another trifecta. Your goal also is to prolong the game and get the board filled up. Plant production good BUT wait until higher global requirement cards as they will be more cost effective. Getting early plant production I think is bad because only incentives space events to destroy your plants, and raise terraforming, which shortens the game.