To Infinity and Beyond!

The Flautist and I decided to alter the rules of Terraforming Mars a couple of weeks ago.  We wanted to try the game with an alternate end condition to see how it made things feel.  Instead of ending the game when all the terraforming tracks ran out, we decided to end it the turn the last card was drawn from the deck.  We played with basic set and preludes.

We knew that this change would lead to higher scores and different card evaluations, but we didn't anticipate quite how out of control it would get.

The early game was fairly normal, though we did play more card draw than usual.  How much card draw I play depends a lot on what I draw, my income, etc. and at times I don't play any because I already have places to spend all the money I have.  I knew the game would be a long one though, so I played every card draw effect available.

The heat ran out on turn 9, and the other tracks maxed out on 12.  We then spent a couple turns filling up the remaining board with cities, then greeneries.  By 14 the board was completely full except for a few spots allocated to specific cards, and at this point the great majority of cards were dead draws.  Thermalist was in play, but I was ahead by 100 heat, so heat and energy production were completely dead.  Our incomes were 135 and 136 counting steel and titanium, so there was no way we could possibly find ways to spend all of our money.  Miner was in play too, but since I had 10 titanium / turn and 9 steel / turn, there was no way for me to lose it.  Greeneries were also impossible, so plant production was also moot.  We looked at our boards for a minute, declared me the winner of Miner and Thermalist, and set aside our boards entirely, declaring all resources infinite.

For the last 3 turns of the game we sat there drawing as many cards as possible, putting the cards we drew straight onto the table, and waiting to see who would get Noctis / Mohole / Phobos to be able to claim Landlord.  I got lucky and collected 2 of the 3 and walked away with all three awards.

The final score was 192 to 170 in my favour.  Key to my victory was scooping all three awards but only having paid for two of them.  I got 23 points from animals, and roughly 60 raw terraform rating, as well as 16 points from Physics Complex.  Honestly the game was a ton of fun, though it did take a long damn time to finish. 

My long term takeaways are that the game as we played it is kind of stupid.  Infinite money makes much of the game feel ridiculous, and it was too long.  However, I actually quite liked knowing that I would get to play all the things, and I enjoyed knowing that we would see all the cards.  I think that the game would be a lot of fun if it was slightly shorter, and I have a couple ideas on how to do that.  First off you could just have players draw five cards a turn each round, which would shorten the game by about two rounds, shaving off the ridiculous infinite resources time.  Also you could simply declare that just like the solo game, the two player game lasts exactly 14 generations.  That is still a long game with lots of opportunity to do fun things but you would never get to infinity, and filling the board would be possible but by no means guaranteed. 

Doing a 14 turn game seems like a cool variant, but I really like seeing all the cards.  Maybe we could just flip over 3 cards every turn and trash them out of the game, so at least we know that all the cards in the deck will be seen by game end.  Not too sure on the best way to achieve that goal, but this kludge kind of gets there.