TerraformingMars

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Nice resource-climbing game. Flavour makes the purchase decisions quite intuitive; after an initial period of "Urk; plants or power or steel?"

The starter player power is kinda nice; but actually I'd pick it later? It's effectively "You have no player power unless you get dealt a blue card that you can play early on" and, well, that leaves you without guidance. It also suggests that the other initial player powers would be built for about 30 - which seems about right.

I did pretty well going for Jovian (which is what my initial cards said to do. Well; that or convert heat to money and back, for no benefit.)

The game's big downside is that you have a LOT of randomness in the cards that you draw. You get to buy 0-4 of 4 cards a turn, and there's the opportunity to draw maybe another 3 all game. Did you e.g. invest in titanium production? Well, maybe you'll never see a card that consumes it. You will lose. I didn't see a single way to improve your dig, or search the discards, or borrow opponents cards, or really anything to mitigate that major factor other than trying not to overspecialise. There's a draft variant, which seems a lot better. (Though newbie unfriendly, because when do you pick a thing that you can't build yet but turns out to be great late game?)

The late game is also very VERY short. We had one turn in which "Oh, last ocean, and we'll go 3% atmosphere and skip right from -2 to maximum temperature and the game is over" - animals went from non-viable to game-over in that one turn.

And now I want to mash this and evolution together.

OP=Vitenka CategoryGames CapsuleReview?