Two plus one

I have been playing a lot of Terraforming Mars over the past year and much of that has been training people new to the game.  One of the greatest acquired skills in Mars is the ability to figure out which cards to pay for and which not.  Mostly I find the problem that new players have is they keep far too many cards and end up with 100+ cost worth of cards at the end of the game that they need to dump.

This is a major flaw in their game, and leads to huge blowouts.  The key is that all the money you don't have invested into infrastructure is wasted.  If I keep 3 extra cards for 9 bucks I could have probably spent that money to get 2 income per turn.  That income adds up, and means that people who perfectly ride the wave of cards with little waste end up with a lot more stuff at the end of the game.

Obviously the way to fix this is to play Mars 100 times and git gud.  However, that isn't much use to a newbie in the short term, so I have come up with a formula for how many cards to keep that I call Two Plus One.

What this means is that you keep cards that you can afford to play over this turn and the next.  You get two turns, including the turn you are buying the cards on, to play everything in your hand.  If you want to keep delicious cards such that you can't play them all over 2 turns, slap yourself smartly across the face, both sides, and stop buying cards.

There is an exception.

You don't want to end up with no cards to play, and sometimes the game throws you only crap.  The way you hedge against this is to keep one singular card in addition to the guidelines above.  That singular card must be generically good, extremely expensive, and hopefully uses up steel or titanium if you are producing any significant amount of either.  The best examples of this are cards like Open City, which you can slam down for a bunch of points and plants to use up steel and/or cash, or Giant Ice Asteroid which also provides points and income to use up your titanium and/or cash.

Do not under any circumstances keep a bunch of cheaper cards just in case you don't draw anything good.  Spending 3 bucks to hedge against a total whiff on new cards is okay, spending 9 is game losing.

Keep 2 turns of cards, plus 1 more expensive card.  That is all.  Throw the rest away.

This strategy won't win you championships, but it will put you steps ahead of the other noobs, and it will make sure you don't end up throwing away a hand of cards you paid good money for at the end of a game.  You don't want to be that chump.