44 stranded plants

Last night I played Terraforming Mars with The Flautist.  She is on a quest to beat me at the game, as I have taken victory in all of our five plays so far.  Last night was not her night as I won the game 133-114.  A high scoring game, no doubt, and one that broke a couple of records in my experience.

First off the game ended on turn 16.  I have never seen a game go that long, and it happened because I built a modest heat engine and she didn't build one at all.  Oxygen ran out rapidly due to Steelworks and Ecoline, and oceans followed.  However, heat sat there ticking up once per turn and we continued to pour our money into buying cities and greeneries.

The Flautist was definitely way ahead in the early going because she grabbed 2 Milestones (Gardener and Terraformer) and had many Greeneries out.  I built an engine producing a ton of steel and titanium and eventually my engine got enough cards in play to rush past her early lead. 

Bizarrely we ran out of room on the board to play all those greeneries and cities we were buying as standard projects.  On the final turn nobody could legally place a greenery and we had 18 plant production between us so we ended the game with 44 unused plants.  I have in the past seen a single four player game where someone couldn't place a greenery on the final turn, but I have never seen anything like this is terms of wasted opportunities.  5 greeneries unable to come down!

The game had a lot of fascinating choices.  At turn 10 it looked like it was going to end really quickly, but the lack of heat cards meant that if it was to end soon, somebody was going to have to buy ~9 standard projects to finish it off.  That would have left all kinds of juicy opportunities for the other player to place key cities and greeneries, so neither of us could afford to end the game fast - we just had to play it out.  This lead to a lot of tricky choices about city placement - how do you decide how many cities to play?  Slamming down tons of cities with no greeneries seems nuts, but if you get all the best placements by doing so and the game takes forever it could be fantastic.

It ended up that we spent 4 turns or so just placing cities and surrounding them with green while throwing away all the cards because they were junk.  I certainly haven't seen that dynamic before.

In any case my respect for TM as a 2 player game is still growing.  The game can play out so many different ways that there is a huge amount of skill and practice required to be excellent, and I like that.