Terraforming Mars Game

Thursday when I was out, I bought a couple of games. One of them was "Terraforming Mars", which I hadn't heard of, but which looked interesting. From reading the back of the box, the idea is that the different players are different corporations, contributing to the terraforming of Mars (for money and power and fame, of course, not altruism). The game ends when Mars is deemed to be terraformed. The player with the most victory points wins.

Yesterday I unpacked it and read the rules and discovered at the back of the rule book that one of the given variations is a solo game. So I set it up for that, and played one game, to help me get a feel for the rules and the play. I lost, of course. The way the solo game goes, rather than counting your victory points, you have to complete the terraforming within 14 rounds (called "generations" because terraforming has to be done over multiple lifetimes). Of course I kept going after the 14th generation, and managed to complete the terraforming four generations later, so it wasn't too bad. ( Read more... )

In conclusion, I would say that I definitely want to try this out with my gaming friends and family - though I expect Certain People will have unholy glee in playing the nasty cards...