Yesterday I played a lot of games. Two of those games were Terraforming Mars, one 3p game and one 5p game. The 5p game had the distinction of being the fastest game of TM I have ever seen - 6 turns. It makes sense that the game would be quick with 5 players, and it is good that it didn't go 12 turns or something because with 5 people that would take way too long to play out. Unfortunately when a game of TM lasts only 6 turns it is a stupid game in many ways.
TM has lots of cards, most of which generate income of some sort or other. The cards are balanced such that they pay for themselves after four rounds, roughly speaking. This works well in a 9 turn game where you transition from generating income and engine building into point generation about halfway through the game. It is terrible when the game lasts 6 turns because income cards played on turn 2 only just pay for themselves, so you really only build an engine on turn 1. After that, just get points. You can have a fun game where you just hunt for points, but when most of the deck is built around the idea of building an engine it feels silly.
Certainly in the game I played that went only 6 turns the shortness of the game made a lot of plays look ridiculous. For example, on round 4 someone dropped down a microbes card that generates a point every 3 turns. She played it the instant it was legal and only got a single point out of it, paying 16 bucks for the privilege. That is worse than a standard project! About half of the plays in the game were of this nature, setting up income when everyone really should have just been doing standard project Greenery over and over, occasionally interspersed with cities.
We were using the Colonies expansion and this made things even sillier looking given the 6 turns. Of the 7 colonies in play, only 4 were ever used, and each of those was only used once. The idea of placing a colony in order to generate income when people visited it was laughable, and the cards that generated trade fleets and better trading were worthless from the start. Of course this also increased the percentage of blank cards in the deck, pushing people further towards standard projects.
I built a big engine on turn 1 and then spent the rest of the game throwing meteors all over the place. I bought a couple of cities, some standard projects, the Terraformer milestone, an award, and won the game comfortably. I enjoyed the game, but it did feel silly that I just tossed nearly all the cards I drew after turn 2 in the trash because there wasn't any point in cards anymore. I kept only 3 cards in the second half of the game - a city, a card to generate massive income to snag Banker (didn't end up using it), and an income card that I regretted buying moments after paying for it. The rest were all rubbish.
What it all adds up to is TM is a bad 5 player game. The 2 player version is my favourite by far, in large part because of how swingy the hate cards are when you have 3 players. If you get targetted it often feels like you lose just because you happened to look threatening, not because of any play choices. With 2 or 3 players you have time to build a big engine, use the deck, and only throw away your cards at the end of the game. I like that style a lot more, and it feels like the game was built to be played that way.
Unfortunately at WBC there are a lot of games that are much better competitive games at 2 or 3 players rather than 4. TM is one of them. However, few of these games can manage to hold heats with so few players per table because there aren't enough copies of the games to go around. It is unfortunate, but it is a practical limit that I can't see a good way around.
No comments:
Post a Comment