I first learned about this game a week and a half before Gencon. The title and the short phrase "heavy Eurogame" drew me in. I read the rulebook and continued to be interested. So Thursday morning when the convention hall opened, I decided to buy Terraforming Mars without demoing it.
And the verdict is: It's fantastic. We played 4 games during Gencon and we'll definitely be playing more.
As a brief overview of mechanics: Each turn you draw 4 cards and choose which ones you want to keep. Each one that you add to your hand costs $3, and the rest are discarded face down. Then players go in a circle taking 1 or 2 action. The typical actions are play a card, use a card, or use one of the various actions open to everyone. If you don't want to or can't do anything, you pass and then you're out for the rest of the turn. This whole process will be very familiar to anyone who's played Terra Mystica. Once everyone's passed, you get goods based on your production and move to the next round!
Pros:
• The theme is perfect. Every card makes a lot of sense. It's just so much fun to be dropping asteroids on the surface.
• In my 4 games, we tried a lot of different strategies, and they all seemed viable.
• It comes with a few different variants included: A bunch of extra cards to add to the deck, instructions to draft cards each turn instead of just drawing them, and a solo variant. 629
I haven't tried the solo game, but the other two are great!
• A lot of the art is really nice. In particular the box art and card backs are gorgeous.
• The cards have both symbols and text saying what they do. When you're learning, use the text. But later you can pretty much ignore it.
Cons:
• The card draws can be pretty random. A few cards can swing a close game (although they're definitely expensive to play). It's also possible that you get set up for one thing, but the cards for the payoff never happen. The draft variant mitigates this a lot
• While the art is nice, the mix of photographs, 3D renders, and traditional art on the cards occasionally bugs me. But really I rarely notice.
Other notes:
• After a few games, I have a few questions that I just couldn't find an answer to in the rulebook. Most of these come from card interactions. It's practically unavoidable without a giant rulebook.
• When I saw the player boards I was a bit skeptical: spots to put cubes of different size and color to indicate amounts of each good, with another cube to indicate production? But it does end up working out really well.
• I saw and heard a few people criticize the rule book, but I didn't have much trouble learning and teaching the game. I did miss one rule, but that was my fault, not the book's. The rule I missed is that before the first turn, everyone draws 10 cards and buys to hand instead of the normal research phase. This meant our second and third games were a little slower to ramp up, and that we didn't necessarily have any really goals to work towards in hand.
Here are the different combinations of games we played:
• 3 players, everyone on Beginner Corporation, no expansion, no drafting
• 3 players, deal 4 pick 1 corp, with expansion, no drafting
• 2 players, pick whichever corp sounds cool, no expansion, no drafting
• 3 players, deal 4 pick 1 corp, no expansion, with drafting
TL;DR: This is a combination of the mechanics of Terra Mystica and the card variety of Race for the Galaxy. It comes together perfectly and is just dripping with a great theme! 629