Start your engines

This past week I played a couple of Terraforming Mars 1v1 games.  I have concluded that TM is best in that format, in large part because of the way the hate cards work.  In 4p games hate cards aren't usually good, but when they get played they feel terrible because it seems so utterly random.  There is an awful lot of power in convincing people that you are the player in last place just so they don't hit you, and I hate that dynamic.  I also find that it sucks to want to avoid production - getting a steel production feels weak because I often feel like it is just going to get stolen.

I also dislike the way that plant production just makes you a target for meteors in 4p.  When anyone plays a meteor they just look about for someone to punish, and you don't want to be that someone, so plant production feels actively pointless.

In 2p though these dynamics are totally different.  For one, you see much less of the deck so the hate cards are far less likely to exist - you can get a steel production without being convinced it will get stolen at some point.  Also the negative points that are on many hate cards remove a lot of the sting - getting stolen from still sucks, but at least your only competitor lost a point!  The worst part about hate cards in 4p games is that you often watch the person in last place lose a point just to punish you even though you aren't winning.  The lower number of cards also means that it is far less likely that meteors will destroy all of your early plants, and if they do get destroyed at least your only opponent had to pay a lot to accomplish that.

The hate cards in 2p are actually really good, and that is okay by me.  I don't mind that they are super efficient, because at least I don't have to feel like someone is torching their own game just to hurt me like I do in 4p.

I also like that the income cards are a lot better.  In many 4p games income cards are terribly weak if they aren't played by turn 2 because the game may end on turn 8, and it feels silly to be ignoring income when the game is only just starting up.  In 2p the game goes long (my last 2 games were 12 and 13 turns) so you can comfortably play income cards until turn 7-8, which lets you really have fun building a powerful engine.

In fact those income cards are so good they can turn around games where you lose the critical milestones.  In my last game I was the plant corporation, so I took it for granted that I would win the Gardener milestone for having 3 forests.  Unfortunately for me Naked Man started with Inventrix and quickly grabbed the 16 card milestone, then blew up 5 of my plants cheaply, then played Arctic Algae to get 11 plants.  He bought a forest to get the Gardener milestone ahead of me, then bought a city to get the city milestone.  With those points on board and 3 milestones he was *20* ahead.  I thought for certain I had lost.

But I had been doing things.  I had my heat production up to 11, plants to 4, and energy to 3.  I grabbed Physics Complex, and began pounding out temperature increases, Physics points, Herbivores, Tardigrades, and more forests.  He had poured everything into getting those milestones, so he had basically no production at all.  The 20 point lead he had just melted in the face of my 6 / turn for 5 turns, and I won by about 12 points.  In the 4p game if you get no milestones it is disastrous because it is so hard to have enough income to do anything as powerful as getting 5 points for 8 bucks.  But in 2p where the game goes long, you can easily win doing it the way I did, by having a monstrous income that just keeps paying off. 

Milestones are excellent, obviously, but you have to be careful that you don't throw away too much in pursuit of them, and I like where that balance lies in 2p a lot more than in 4p.  In the game previous to the one I just described I managed to get all 3 milestones, 2 awards, and 3 Jovian payoff cards and won by 36, so sometimes you do just get to do it all.  In any case 2p TM feels like a fantastic game, and I wish I could try playing it competitively a bunch to try to get better at it.  Sort of like Carcassone, the game feels super interesting and deep when 2p, and like you are really at the mercy of random player choices in 4p.