Just end it

I have played Terraforming Mars a bunch of times over the past few weeks and I keep running into a consistent theme:  When the games ends on turn 8, I win, and when it ends on turn 12, I lose.  I think I was inadvertently taught that you have to plan on 8 turn games when I first started playing TM and that lesson has stuck with me too well.  No matter how often my games go long I continually find myself calculating the returns on infrastructure investments as if the game will end on turn 8 and I stop taking income cards on about turn 4.

My last game was an excellent example of this.  Amazon was playing as Tharsis and she had a ton of cities in play.  Her obvious game plan was to build up a ton of plant production and build high value greeneries adjacent to multiple cities.  She bought the Award for highest number of Greeneries, which seemed kind of crazy because she had no Greeneries at the time, but in retrospect makes sense.  If she managed to get the Greenery engine to work, she would win, and if it failed, she was dead in the water anyway.  Unfortunately for her plan the game ended on turn 8 so she had a giant pile of cities and only 2 Greeneries.  I had 5 Greeneries so I cashed in on the award and won the game handily.

Amazon consistently builds really powerful engines that peak on turn 12.  In our previous two games she built said engine, the game went to turn 12, and she won.  In both those games I built engines that sputtered out around turn 7 and I couldn't end the game in time so I lost.

I think that it the real skill in the game, the most critical thing for a high level player to develop, is a sense of how fast the game will end.  Figuring out which cards give the highest return on investment isn't complicated, but it does have one key variable you must supply - how many turns are left in the game?  If you stop buying income cards too early you won't have enough stuff on the final turn, and if you buy them too late you end up with no points when the game terminates.

Naked Man runs a game similar to Amazon's in that it peaks late, but he does it differently.  He buys huge numbers of cards early trying to save them up to snag Awards out from under people.  In a game that goes long he has lots of options for spending late game money and that pays off, but if the game ends early like this last one did he winds up with a bunch of potentially powerful but ultimately useless cards in his hand.  Keeping situational cards is great if they grab you 5 points from an Award, but having 12 bucks from your first two turns be wasted is a disaster.

You can only go so far though in planning.  The decision to keep late game cards and situational cards in your hand on turn 1 has to be made before you know anything about what your opponents are doing.  You can't guess how long the game will be at that point, and the choices you make are critical.  You can know the metagame of your group and how long they tend to play for, but you can't ever be entirely sure.  Some games the cards come up so one player plays Soletta, another plays Aquifer Pumping, and a third plays Steelworks, and that game is going to end on turn 8 no matter what you decide.  Other games have two people fighting over Jovian cards and another earning points directly with Physics Complex, and that game will take absolutely forever to finish up.

I find though that I continually plan on an 8 turn game without really looking at it properly.  I think this is currently the greatest weakness with my game - I need to get better at reading that, and be willing to shift my strategy if it looks like a particular end condition is going to take a long time to reach.  There is randomness, and I can't control a lot of that, but I am sure I can be better than I have been so I don't rely quite so much on luck of endgame timing to get me my victories.