Honestly, the first time I saw Terraforming Mars at a board game cafe, I almost thought it was some college student's final project presentation.
The illustrations on the cards are all over the place—some are documentary satellite photos, some are clumsy 3D renders, and some are even public-domain clip art. The text is densely packed, the layout has zero aesthetic sense, and the little square components shedding paint is just business as usual.
But this is exactly the kind of heavy Eurogame with "questionable industrial design" that, as long as you sit down at the table and play your first card, you'll fall completely under its spell.
The most addictive part of this game is that extreme "positive feedback snowball."
Early on you're broke as can be, and after calculating for ages you can't even afford to plant a single tree, so you can only watch the temperature gauge creep up bit by bit on the desolate Martian surface. But by the seventh or eighth generation, your hand engine is running perfectly smoothly. You're taking in seventy or eighty credits per turn, and you've accumulated a pile of overpowered combos spanning three eras. Your last action just detonated an asteroid to heat the atmosphere, and your next action directly lays out a huge forest to produce oxygen, along the way placing a giant city connected to three greenery tiles.
That sense of accomplishment from personally turning a "frozen dead star with not a soul in sight" into "a second home full of lights and life" is something most point-scoring Eurogames can't give you.
Of course, if you're planning to get into it, you'd better be mentally prepared for these few things: First, a single game takes a long time—a four-player game with newcomers often starts at three hours, so players prone to analysis paralysis should beware; Second, the table space needed is huge—laying out all the cards and markers requires a very large table; Third, don't get too hung up on the art—the soul of this game lies entirely in its exquisite numerical model and freedom of construction.
Which playstyle do you think is the most satisfying in Terraforming Mars? The ecology style of frantically planting trees, or the pure titanium space style of quietly making a fortune?
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