I have, sitting on my game shelves, the board game of Terraforming Mars, where you and your closest friends (or you, solo) set about competing to see who can make Mars habitable the fastest. There’s no fighting or monsters. You play a corporation or NGO that has its own unique mission statement that provides you some sort of benefit during play. Each turn, you buy projects that you then work to complete using resources you generate. When Mars is completely terraformed, whoever contributed the most, wins.
Expansions set the board in different regions of Mars, add Venus, add the moons of the outer planets and asteroids, or even let you play the political game by becoming a delegate to the World Government that oversees your corporations.
The game lets you choose from a huge variety of cards to begin — the Prelude expansion adds even more. Those starting cards help determine how you will be playing the game; every single game plays out differently. We have five people in our game group, and each one has their own goals and benefits.
This is a problem.
I mean this in the nicest way possible. The game is too good.
Between Kasul and I, we must have a hundred board games stored away. But whenever we’re not doing D&D and we’re asked to bring a board game, most of the time it’s, “hey, bring Terraforming Mars.” It’s a no brainer. The game is going to be fun, we can swap in different expansions to change the entire nature of the game, and it’s a game of friendly competition instead of domination. My son likes huge science projects, like crashing the poor, abused smaller moon of Deimos into the planet in order to rack up some cheap heat and resource games. My daughter likes genetically modifying plants to survive. Kasul works with microorganisms. My son-in-law builds cities. Me? I typically like engineering projects.
But the projects you draw might have different ideas.
We’re playing HeroQuest during our “smaller” game night, and I’ve informed Kasul that he is in charge of determining our next small group game once HeroQuest is done. But when the full family gets together — it’s Terraforming Mars, more often than not. And on those days it’s not… it’s Red Dragon Inn.
Which is a whole ‘nuther story.
