Back in the Before Times, when we only had a small number of board games, Game Night would rotate between Magic the Gathering, Vast and Terraforming Mars. Now we have dozens of games to play, but Terraforming Mars is still on our rotation.
When the local game store opened as part of Connecticut’s post-pandemic reopening, I went there (masked, of course) looking for the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars.
(We’d heard there were spaceships. SPACE. SHIPS.) They didn’t have it, but they did have another expansion we’d missed, Turmoil.
Turmoil adds the powerful Terraforming Council to the game. Unlike the other expansions, it does not add new lands to settle, but it does add a new phase to the game: Turmoil.
The Terraforming Council has been an NPC faction to this point, allocating rewards for moving the terraforming process forward. Turmoil brings the political element to Terraforming Mars.
Each generation, players help various factions (the Unity party, the Mars First party, the Reds, the Scientists, etc) navigate the future of the planet. The Kelvinists want to make Mars hotter, and if that adds more radiation or less water to the planet, well, that’s just part of the game. Mars First is bitterly opposed to what’s left of Earth. Science wants huge projects. Reds just want anarchy.
The players have a chance to take control of the discussions and make them work in the favor of whatever they and their corporations have going. And they’ll need to make sure Mars is ready for the disasters that lie ahead.
The council chambers are one of the two new boards that come with Turmoil. The other is the Global Events board. This board tells what will happen on Mars one and two generations in the future, and what is happening now, and which faction will best be able to use this news to take power. This gives players chances to gain influence and perhaps lead a faction for a generation, adding new opportunities for tactics and cooperative play.
Influence is the new currency, and lobbying is the new standard task (though they emphasize: lobbying is not a standard task, but it is in all but name). Once you’ve risen to the leadership of a party, and even become the chair of the Terraforming Committee, there is always another party vying for dominance, ready to take the chair and steer the course of Mars for the next generation.
The Terraforming Committee wants to reward the players so much, that it penalizes each player a terraforming point each turn. This leads to a far more cash-starved game, and a less habitable Mars in the end. I’m not sure this was the aim of the expansion, but it could be once we get more insight into the workings of the Committee and how best to align ourselves with the coming disasters, things will pick up a bit.
Next time, we’ll probably play without the Venus Next expansion in order to speed up the base game a little bit and leave more time to helping factions jockey for dominance and better able to make best use of the future Global Events.
It was an expansion that promised a faster and richer game, and for us, that didn’t happen. But it did add an entirely new element to the game of negotiation and, sometimes, teamwork, that does help make it a deeper game.
The expansion also came with these cool, two-layer player boards 🙂 Not worth the price of the box for them alone, but then again, maybe they are!
Also, the ocean tiles are new — I printed them to finish the 3D-ization of the game. Minor, but was something I always wanted to do once I got a printer of my own.
