Adventures in Terraforming

 The Flautist and I have been trying more Terraforming Mars experiments in our 2p games.  First we tried a powered up version of the game where every turn we got two prelude cards each and picked one to keep.  This would clearly generate a ridiculous game, so we started at only ten Terraform Rating each to keep our incomes more in line with the base game.  A new prelude each turn is a lot more powerful than ten money, and the game ended early at turn nine.  I got lucky and hit 30 bucks and 21 bucks as my last two preludes, which was certainly a lot better than random income on the final turns.

The Flautist isn't one for half measures though, so she wanted to try that again but with full income.  Naturally getting a free prelude every turn made the game silly fast, and we ended on turn 7.  The board was mostly empty as we had just taken as much pure terraform as possible, due to the rapid game end.  It was an amusing experiment, but didn't really make for a great game.  Much like playing with five players, playing with that much extra stuff ends the game so fast that much of the game no longer matters.  Income cards and things that generate points over turns don't work, and that cuts out too much of the play for my tastes.

Our next experiment was aimed at finding out how it would feel if there were no randomness in card draws.  I usually win the games, in part because I memorize the whole deck and she doesn't.  If we drew exactly the same cards would I find it an advantage because I can predict her plays, or a disadvantage because she doesn't have to worry about what I might have because she has it too?

We decided to do this by taking two separate TM sets and building two decks ordered identically.  Every time she would draw she would do so from her deck and me from mine.  With identical resources, would our games play out nearly the same?

Our games sure didn't play out the same.  We each got the same corporations and preludes, and I selected Inventrix over Helion.  I don't like Helion at the best of times, though admittedly it has some sweet endgame angles when the Thermalist award is in play, but the extra three cards granted by Inventrix seemed crucial so I wouldn't fall behind in information.  Between preludes and ocean cards in our opening hands we got to four oceans on turn 1, and I used Inventrix's special power to drop Kelp Farming.

Kelp Farming turn 1 is a hilarious smashing, and could easily have gotten me the game by itself.  However, I leveraged Inventrix into AI Central to draw tons of cards, and Earth Catapult, Anti Gravity, and Research Outpost to give me -5 cost on all those cards I was drawing.  Six cards a round at -5 cost is preposterous, and we ended the game on turn 11 with me 50 points ahead.

The Flautist likes Helion, and didn't quite realize how powerful the extra three starting cards from Inventrix would be.  She chose Helion, which meant that the entire game I knew exactly what cards she would draw each turn, and knew what to play around and what to ignore.  Not having the extra science symbol from Inventrix also meant that she couldn't get a science set up going, and while she did play Earth Catapult she couldn't abuse it nearly as badly as I abused my discount / card draw engine.

Inventrix kind of broke our format.  We were supposed to be drawing the same cards each turn and then planning around that, but instead I got new stuff each turn and knew what she was getting before she did.

The Flautist wanted to change the format for another go at this, but this time remove all card draw from the deck to ensure that we would get the same cards every turn.  That is one way to go about it, but I came up with another idea I like:  Build 4 decks.  2 of the decks, using half of each of our sets, would be our decks to draw our standard 4 cards a turn from.  They would be ordered identically, of course.  This way no matter what happens we get the same cards on each turn.  Then build 2 more decks with the rest of the cards, also ordered identically, and use those decks for all other card draw.  This way card draw remains in the game and works fine, and there is an advantage to drawing more as you know what your opponent has access to, but you cannot completely predict their draws because each turn they get 4 cards that you don't know about until you get the same ones.

I like this theory a lot.  I don't think it would make a good long term format but it should give an interesting experience and let us actually do the thing we intended to do in the first place - each draw the same cards every turn and try to outfox each other given that information.

Greed is good

 The Flautist and I did another Terraforming Mars alternate rules test.  As I said last time, we decided to see what would happen if we dealt ourselves a bunch of the best trading themed cards from the Colonies expansion.  We took the best 10, dealt out 5 to each of us, and then 5 random cards.  We played the basic corporation so we would have to keep the cards and then played.

Our 5 colonies were cash, titanium, steel, heat, and oceans.  On turn 1 we had 5 colonies out, 3 on cash, 2 on titanium.  Turn 2 saw another colony on titanium, and turn 3 saw 2 more colonies, both on steel.  I played a trading enhancer and a couple ways to make trading cheaper, and The Flautist played 2 additional trade fleets and a way to make trading cheaper.  It was silly.  We had 19 cash, 6 titanium, and 10 steel coming in every turn between us, to say nothing of the extra income from the colonies themselves.  It wasn't just that though - I drew huge income cards and ended the game with 58 raw income and 49 terraform rating, for 107 cash incoming on turn 11... and that didn't even take into account my 5 titanium and 6 steel income.

We filled the entire board on turn 11 and then ended the game with both of us having exactly 38 dollars in front of us that we could not spend on anything.

This isn't a surprise of course.  The trading cards all multiply together, each one making the others more potent.  More than that though, the fact that one of us was in trading meant it was more profitable for the other one to dip into trading too.  I find the opposite usually occurs in large games, as much of the time nobody builds a trading empire at all.  It just isn't worth it unless you get a good combo of cards, and if nobody else joins you in building colonies the return on investment is paltry.

But when every player builds colonies as fast as they can, whoo baby the game goes crazy.

It was a fun experiment but clearly it warps the game completely.  If we hadn't gotten quite as strong a set of colonies the story might have gone differently but even if I was just producing a glorious stack of heat and power it still ends the game quickly.  I suppose it might have been a more normal looking game if a bunch of the colonies that don't enter play right away had been randomly chosen, but that wouldn't even have been much fun, or fit with the theme.

Much like Jovian cards, the trading cards need a critical mass to be good.  Below that point they aren't worth much, but above it they become the entire game.  That does give the game a lot of variety but it does mean that dealing them all out like this feels kind of silly.

I have another idea for our next rules experiment - reject draft.  Any time a player decides not to buy a card or discards a card for money the other player may choose to buy it for 3 bucks if they want to.  I hope this makes card choices much more interesting and lets us assemble cool combos.  I considered making it so that any card you discard can be bought by the other player at a discount - after all, it is a patent that seemingly has little value.  Market value depends on demand!  It would be tricky to figure out if you should buy a mediocre card for 3 if it would cost your opponent only 2 to purchase it.

Naturally this just increases the power level of the game, giving players more choices.  It isn't nearly as big a power level jump as the 'all the trading cards' game we just played though, so I expect the final board state to look a lot more normal.

Alternate formats being just the same

 The Flautist and I have been playing lots of 1v1 Terraforming Mars over the last half year and we have taken to performing experiments with the game.  The first experiment was to end the game only once the deck of cards ran out, and this resulted in a fun but silly game that we don't intend on repeating.

Our second attempt at new rulesets was born because we wanted to try a game where we both got *tons* of card draw.  We figured the game would go really long because our early money would be invested in cards rather than heat / plants / ocean production, but it didn't quite work out that way.  We set it up by choosing 10 great card draw cards, shuffling them, and dealing 5 of them to each of us.  Then we dealt 5 other random cards to each of us and we played the basic corporation.  This way we were both guaranteed to get an engine.  We had 8 basic science symbols and 2 cards that required 3 science symbols to play.

The Flautist drew 6 science symbols.  I drew 2 science symbols, and both of the cards that require 3 science.  Unlikely, and quite a mess for me.  She slammed down her engine and it was a tremendous success, though not because of all the card draw.  She played the science payoff card that gives 4 energy on turn 2, the one that gives 6 energy on turn 3, and the other one that gives 4 energy on turn 4.  By turn 5 she had 17 energy production, a steelworks to turn it into oxygen, and then dropped the top science payoff card Anti Gravity to top it all off, making all of her cards cheaper.

With her taking an oxygen and a heat every turn and me using a bunch of steel production to place an ocean every turn using Aquifer Pumping we ripped through the game and ended on turn 11.

My game went reasonably well too, with my turn 4 Advanced Alloys boosting 3 steel and 4 titanium per turn.  I built a ton of cities and greeneries, notching 37 points just from greenery/city board points (pretty good for turn 11) and almost stole the terraforming lead on the last turn by grabbing 10 terraform.  It wasn't enough, and 14 points of Jovian payoffs still left me behind, losing the game by a single point.

Our attempt to have a long game with lots of cards drawn didn't work.  All it did was give one of us a ludicrous early science engine.  We drew cards, sure, but I didn't get into card draw until halfway through the game, and The Flautist ended up tossing away a dozen cards at the end.

We had fun with it, but given how the card draw cards work it isn't that easy to have lots of cards without also making the science portion of the game kinda broken.  Card draw without science symbols is kinda limited.  If we had randomly not drawn the science payoffs for awhile I think it would have gone a lot more like we envisioned.

The next experiment we are going to do is one based on the colonies expansion.  When we play a few colonies usually get put down, but they usually don't play a crucial part in the game.  We plan on doing something similar to this last experiment where we take 10 trading / colony cards, deal 5 to each of us along with 5 random cards, and see where we end up.  There will be a ton of extra resources in the game because of all the trading, but our other production will surely be miserable given that set up.

We shall see if she can notch another win against me with this weird setup.  I suspect there will be some serious randomness in the cards - if one of us gets cheaper trading and better trading along with 4 energy production they are going to have an absurd early engine, particularly since there *will* be lots of colonies further boosting trades.

I will report back with the results.  If you have any other odd rulesets that you would like to see me try out and report on, speak up. 

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.

The systems, at least

I recently bought the online version of Terraforming Mars, and it was something of a disappointment. The graphics are fine, and the implementation seems to be complete, but there are serious problems with both the AI and the multiplayer stability.

I totally understand when an AI isn't good at a game.  It is a complex problem to make an AI understand the fine points of a game, especially when you want that game to be moddable or extendable.  Chess is an easier problem that other games, in a way, because the rules are set in stone.  Unfortunately a game like TM needs an AI that can cope with card changes, expansions, and variable numbers of players, and this dramatically increases the challenge of coding it.

Given all that, I get why the AI in TM is bad.  What I don't get is why it isn't even capable of understanding game systems.  Some cards in TM take a production from one person and give it to another.  Unfortunately the AI doesn't understand this, so it will try to play a card that takes steel production when it is the only one who is producing steel.  It ends up stealing production from itself, completely negating the card.  I am fine with an AI that plays cards suboptimally, but an AI that plays attack cards to blow up its own stuff?  That is unforgivably sloppy coding.

This reminds me of the AI in Civ 6.  I get that the AI there is weak and makes random choices.  That is fine, if unfortunate.  But when the AI is completely incapable of understanding an entire game system I get grumpy at the developers.  You can't just make aircraft a big portion of the game and then forget to tell the AI how to build or use them!  (It turns out you *can* do this, and they did, but it makes them look foolish in the extreme.)

The other issue with TM is the buggy multiplayer.  When I tried multiplayer there were serious disconnect problems and the chat window just stopped working.  I get that online games are not a simple problem, but if your game can't even maintain a basic chat window, you are not ready for release.  It is not just me either, as lots of reviews on the product on Steam talked about similar bugs in online play.

Really the TM game is best played solo.  It is a fine game for that, and seems to work flawlessly.  I just can't get past the game having massive issues with any number of players beyond one, and it irks me that the one company to get the rights to produce the game I like so much really screwed the dog on this one.

I am not asking much here.  An AI that takes random actions that all forward its position in some way, and an online mode that lets players stay connected, play the game, and type to each other.  That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, and yet apparently it is too much.

Maybe someday TM will be sold to a competent developer.  Until then, I guess we are likely stuck with in person play, playing solo, or a buggy, half baked mess.

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.

Flap flap

Wingspan is a new game I just ran into last night.  It was the sort of game that I needed to play a second time right away because I had to know if my thoughts about strategy were correct.  This is a good sign.

The easiest comparison I have to it is Terraforming Mars.  However, I think Wingspan actually does it better, and that is saying a lot since I have been playing a ton of TM and I want to play more.  The main points of comparison are that they are both engine building games with a mix of group and solitaire elements, and they both have extremely strong thematic elements that speak to a lot of research.

Wingspan is a game about running a bird sanctuary.  You collect types of birds, and then have to put them in your sanctuary by collecting food that they like.  Each bird has a bunch of different attributes that interact with point generation but they also have a special ability of some sort, and these special abilities form your engine.  You can set it up so you have specific actions that are extremely powerful, and then use them to generate a ton of points.

The cards are beautiful and show great attention to scientific detail.  Birds have habitats, nest types, wingspans, and other attributes to keep them unique, and the pictures and flavour text really bring it all in.  It also does a great job making the mechanics fit the theme, which I appreciate.  I think the numbers in the game are quite well done too, as we consistently ended up building engines that did powerful stuff, but the game ended just a touch before we could do everything we wanted to.  There was always a sense of urgency and desperation on the last few turns trying to squeeze out every last point, and I quite liked that.

There were a couple of issues.  The first is the readability of text and icons.  Black text on dark brown is tough to read at a distance, and the icons are small.  There was a lot of people picking up bird cards and staring at them to make out what the card did and its attributes.  While I do like the pictures of the birds on the cards, I would really appreciate the designers shrinking the pictures by 30% and increasing the size of the font and icons to help people see the cards from further away.

The second issue was a balance issue.  Most of the cards work equally at any number of players.  They do stuff on your turn, so whether it is 2p or 5p is irrelevant.  However, there are a few cards that do stuff on your opponent's turns, so when there are a lot of players those cards are extremely powerful.  Certain ones seemed completely crazy powerful in large games, especially when dropped on turn 1.  A normal good card might generate 5 resources over the course of a game, and you would be happy to play that card.  One of these 'on opponent's turn' cards could handily generate 15 resources over a game, and that seems completely out of line.

I like the theme of these cards, and I am sure there is a player count where they are completely fine.  Unfortunately if you play with a lot of players the game looks like it will hugely favour the person who gets one of these power cards in their opening hand.  I am not so much a fan of that.

Still, this balance concern is just a fact of life in games like this.  Just as a TM player can choose Interplanetary Cinematics and drop down Advanced Alloys, Aquifer Pumping, Nuclear Power, and Strip Mine on their first turn and waltz to victory, some bird draws in Wingspan are a huge engine right out of the gate. 

Wingspan is a ton of fun.  I am sure bird enthusiasts will enjoy the flavour, and even someone like me who pays no attention to that stuff generally can enjoy how well the fluff is baked into the crunch.  Also I can't stress enough how important it is that the engine building have an appropriate investment and payoff timeline in this sort of game and Wingspan does that to perfection.  There might not be a lot of variance in the general way the game plays out, but there are tons of small decisions and little tweaks you can make that will be different each time, so I suspect this game has a lot of plays in it for me.

Greeneries

I played 2p Terraforming Mars against The Flautist again today.  Her quest to defeat me is not complete - I won by a whopping 28 points, 63 to 91.  One of the things that I leveraged to cash in that victory is the Standard Technology card which makes all of my standard projects cost 3 less.  I bought a lot of greeneries via standard projects, something like 8 of them, and this got me to the Gardener and Terraformer milestones.

One of the key parts of my strategy was ignoring cards.  Once you have Standard Technology buying standard project greeneries is extremely efficient, costing 20 bucks while netting you an income, 3 points, and between 0 and 10 bucks worth of stuff from the board - probably averaging out to around 6.  That income is worth 4, so you end up paying 10 bucks for 3 points.  That is fantastic, far better than pretty much all the cards in the game, particularly since it gets you to Gardener quickly.

Of course you don't get that third point from your greeneries for free.  You have to have a city, and cities are worthless on their own.  If you look at standard project cities they cost 25, of which 4 pays for the income bump you get.  That remaining 21 bucks gets you roughly 6 bucks worth of stuff, same as a greenery does, so you end up down roughly 15 bucks.  Basically if you have a standard city beside 3 greeneries it is a good buy, but otherwise it is weak.  If you have standard technology out, a city is pretty reasonable even if only next to 2 greeneries.  However, if you credit those third points from greeneries to the city instead, greeneries start to look a lot more fair.  2 points for 10 bucks is reasonable, but not special. 

These are only approximations, of course.  You can't get a giant swath of huge placement bonuses for a city and all six greeneries around it.  The board just doesn't end up working that way.  However, if you try that 7 hex plan and get 8 total plants from your placements, you end up paying a grand total of 125 bucks to get an income (4 bucks), 6 TR (54 bucks), and 12 points (60 bucks)  Total = 118 bucks.  That is a strong rate of return, and you have low exposure to hate cards in the process.

After seeing how effective my standard project heavy strategy was I did some more math.  Plant production in TM usually costs about 12 bucks each.  You can get much better rates, but only on cards with harsh restrictions that usually mean they are only out for a turn or two.  Since cards in TM are built with a 25% per turn ROI, this means that each plant costs roughly 3 bucks.  But for 23 bucks you can just get a Greenery standard project immediately!  You would have to output 24 bucks worth of cards to get a similar return. 

The most compelling reason to do the standard project to my mind is that you can avoid getting blown up by meteors and other cards that munch on plant production.  Having predictable plants coming in just sets you up to get ruined multiple different ways, but there are few ways to punish someone for having a lot of cash.

Other standard projects don't work out this way.  Cards that produce oceans usually do so for ~14 bucks, so standard project ocean is weak since it costs 18.  Cards that produce power do so for ~7 bucks, which is far cheaper than the 11 the standard one costs.  Strangely if you want to most things in the game the standard project is much weaker, except for greeneries where it is just as strong if not stronger than the cards that aim to do the same thing.

Standard projects are not all that well balanced, it turns out.  Greeneries cost 5 bucks more than an ocean, and they give you 1 more point.  Quite fair, except that greeneries get you milestones and oceans do not.  Cities are useless until there are a lot of greeneries, then they become good.  Temperature increases are 4 bucks cheaper than an ocean, but they don't give you bonus stuff, so really they are a couple bucks too pricey.  12 would be more appropriate than the 14 they cost now. 

The thing that stands out to me is that plant production is just crap.  You don't get a better rate of return buying production than you do buying standard projects, and the production opens you up to both plant destruction cards like meteors and plant production hate cards like animals.  Standard project greeneries are the way to go, and when you happen to have Credicor as your corp or Standard Technology as a card it is even better.

I think I need to test this more thoroughly, and in my next game I want to play a corp with high starting money and build tons of greeneries via standard projects.  Teractor would be ideal, as they have tons of cash and no particular rules about how to spend it.

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.

The fewer the better

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.

A solo mission to Mars

I just bought Terraforming Mars and have been playing the solo game some.  For those that haven't tried it, here is how it works:  A couple of random cities and greenies get planted on the board, your TR starts at 14, and you have to fully terraform by generation 14.  Assuming you win, then you try to have the highest possible score.

There are some interesting consequences to this ruleset.  You don't get milestones or awards, which reduces your access to fast points.  This means that science tags lose a lot of value because competing for the scientist award isn't a thing.  Also things that have raw points on them are a lot weaker, both because they don't get you to finishing terraforming (and that is actually a LOT of work solo) but also because the game is so long that you really want all your investment to go into income, not points.

The first time I tried I just failed.  The second time I got a score of 124, which is absurdly high.  Everything just went perfectly.  The next two times I got 90, then 82.  I think you would struggle to win the game at all with any score below 70, so 82 is pretty close to the bottom of the barrel for games where you win.

One thing I have been finding about strategy is that power is weak.  Cities don't do anything to terraform, they just give you points, so collecting power in order to drop cities is only good if you already have amazing income going.  You don't need to plant cities early because there is no competition, so you really only need to slam them down on the final game turn.  The other major use of power is Steelworks and the other similar cards that turn power into oxygen - they seem good, but if you actually want to get a huge score I think they are actually weak.  You want to drop 14 greeneries to rack up points, so setting up an oxygen engine actually doesn't do much of anything - in an ideal, high scoring world you get all 14 oxygen just from massive plant production.  If your game is going badly though they can certainly be a path to winning with a low score - better than losing, no doubt.

The most clutch card I have found so far is Aquifer Pumping.  It is 18 to play, and lets you spend 8 per turn to place an ocean.  You absolutely need to get a ton of plant and heat production, but there are lots of cards that do that.  Only Aquifer Pumping really sorts a category completely on its own, and otherwise you are going to have to hack together an ocean strategy from all kinds of ocean cards and standard projects.

If I am going to beat my top score I think the cards I would want in my opening hand include Aquifer Pumping + a path to setting up huge heat production and plant production.  Massive early income cards like Strip Mine or Mohole Area seem like exactly what you want.  There are people who have worked out ways to terraform completely by turn 2 and get 500+ points assuming you can perfectly stack the deck the way you want, but in a normal game where I don't know what is coming these cards are the ones I want to see.

Anyone else that has good ideas for how to think about cards or maximize TM solo score should feel free to chime in - I want to learn to be better at it!

Just end it

I have played Terraforming Mars a bunch of times over the past few weeks and I keep running into a consistent theme:  When the games ends on turn 8, I win, and when it ends on turn 12, I lose.  I think I was inadvertently taught that you have to plan on 8 turn games when I first started playing TM and that lesson has stuck with me too well.  No matter how often my games go long I continually find myself calculating the returns on infrastructure investments as if the game will end on turn 8 and I stop taking income cards on about turn 4.

My last game was an excellent example of this.  Amazon was playing as Tharsis and she had a ton of cities in play.  Her obvious game plan was to build up a ton of plant production and build high value greeneries adjacent to multiple cities.  She bought the Award for highest number of Greeneries, which seemed kind of crazy because she had no Greeneries at the time, but in retrospect makes sense.  If she managed to get the Greenery engine to work, she would win, and if it failed, she was dead in the water anyway.  Unfortunately for her plan the game ended on turn 8 so she had a giant pile of cities and only 2 Greeneries.  I had 5 Greeneries so I cashed in on the award and won the game handily.

Amazon consistently builds really powerful engines that peak on turn 12.  In our previous two games she built said engine, the game went to turn 12, and she won.  In both those games I built engines that sputtered out around turn 7 and I couldn't end the game in time so I lost.

I think that it the real skill in the game, the most critical thing for a high level player to develop, is a sense of how fast the game will end.  Figuring out which cards give the highest return on investment isn't complicated, but it does have one key variable you must supply - how many turns are left in the game?  If you stop buying income cards too early you won't have enough stuff on the final turn, and if you buy them too late you end up with no points when the game terminates.

Naked Man runs a game similar to Amazon's in that it peaks late, but he does it differently.  He buys huge numbers of cards early trying to save them up to snag Awards out from under people.  In a game that goes long he has lots of options for spending late game money and that pays off, but if the game ends early like this last one did he winds up with a bunch of potentially powerful but ultimately useless cards in his hand.  Keeping situational cards is great if they grab you 5 points from an Award, but having 12 bucks from your first two turns be wasted is a disaster.

You can only go so far though in planning.  The decision to keep late game cards and situational cards in your hand on turn 1 has to be made before you know anything about what your opponents are doing.  You can't guess how long the game will be at that point, and the choices you make are critical.  You can know the metagame of your group and how long they tend to play for, but you can't ever be entirely sure.  Some games the cards come up so one player plays Soletta, another plays Aquifer Pumping, and a third plays Steelworks, and that game is going to end on turn 8 no matter what you decide.  Other games have two people fighting over Jovian cards and another earning points directly with Physics Complex, and that game will take absolutely forever to finish up.

I find though that I continually plan on an 8 turn game without really looking at it properly.  I think this is currently the greatest weakness with my game - I need to get better at reading that, and be willing to shift my strategy if it looks like a particular end condition is going to take a long time to reach.  There is randomness, and I can't control a lot of that, but I am sure I can be better than I have been so I don't rely quite so much on luck of endgame timing to get me my victories.

Thieve and keep thieving

Last night I played my second 2 player game of Terraforming Mars against Naked Man.  I won, and it was an absolute rout - the score was 104 to 64, partly on the back of me getting 3 milestones and the first 2 awards, leaving only the last and most expensive award for Naked Man to collect.  We both felt throughout the game that I was ahead but I honestly had no concept of just how big the lead was until the final score landed.

We were both musing on how exactly I won by so much.  There were two things that really stood out, one of which was Naked Man focusing too hard on a single strategy, the other of which was just me getting a ton of punish cards.  Naked Man went for a heavy space strategy, starting with titanium income from his corporation and adding on a ton of additional titanium income throughout the game.  He ended up at 6 titanium per turn, and that is way too much.  Most of the time you can just count titanium as being worth 3 bucks each, and as long as you find enough space cards to spend it on that is accurate.  Unfortunately for him we got fewer space cards than we rated to and so he had 30 titanium sitting in front of him by game end.  It was pretending to be worth 90 bucks but nobody was buying the act.

This is an important lesson.  There isn't really much of a 'space/titanium strategy' exactly.  If you go all in on titanium you will likely end up with far too much and it will be thoroughly wasted.  The first chunks of titanium are pretty good, and can reasonably be thought of as being worth 3 bucks.  However, as you stack more of it the chances that you will have to sink it into a weak card just to use it up rises, as does the smaller chance that it will be wasted completely.

The punish cards in Terraforming Mars can make dabbling in lots of things a risky business.  When you do that you are basically opening yourself up to every punish card out there.  However, going all in on titanium or steel is a different sort of problem because you risk having a stack of resources you can't profitably use.  I think in 2 player dabbling is probably best because you will get to snag half of the punish cards if you want to, and you only get through half the deck anyway so many punish cards won't even appear.  Going all in on a resource just means your opponent has a huge incentive to hate draft your payoff cards, no matter what sort those might be.

I got lucky getting some of the punish cards like Hackers to steal his income, but a couple of them got passed to me.  I think I dropped seven total punish cards, and all of them got full value.  It doesn't seem that exciting to take a card that costs you a net 0 but takes 4 bucks from your opponent but long run that squeeze on their output is brutal.  Terraforming Mars, like many games, has lots of big plays that are exciting and swingy, but it seems even more effective to take a continuous stream of small plays that are strict benefits to your situation.

So in short, you definitely need to avoid going too hard into a single resource when you can't guarantee a good use for it, and in the 2p game the punish cards are just amazing and you have to draft them highly.

One thing I found really funny is that because I had never read the rulebook I didn't know what the default game was actually like.  In the base game everyone starts with one production of every resource, and in the game I was playing that rule is taken out.  My impression right now is that this makes the game worse, largely because of punish cards.  If everyone has a bit of everything you can actually aim your punish cards at the people you think are winning instead of just hitting the only person who happens to have the thing you are punishing.  Plant strategies become more tenable because everybody is going to have some plants so meteors that blow up plants will often get aimed at people who aren't focusing hard on plants instead of always hitting the plant person. 

Keeping that extra production in the game will certainly speed the game up but I have no issue with that, and I would really like to try it out and see if my thinking on punish cards works out the way I want it to.

Just a little less spite

I played Terraforming Mars again this weekend and my impressions of it weren't much changed from the first two times.  The game is well themed, well made, and has some stuff in it that bothers me.  I still don't like the way a lot of the cards punish other players because they so often have no choice in who they attack.  Letting players punish the leader is one thing, but having lots of cards that will usually only be able to attack one target means that the game feels really capricious.

I am not going after the game's balance here; I don't have enough knowledge to do that.  I am just talking about enjoyment and feel.  The cards that destroy stuff suck as far as I am concerned but I am sure if they all went out of the game the balance would massively shift.  My best first guess is that plants would become completely the dominant strategy if the meteors that blow up plants were removed and I don't think that is a good thing.

The other thing that bothered me was the drafting element.  Lots of the time I would open a pack of four cards and see nothing much interesting for me so I would simply hate draft the the the next player needs.  I would often see two good cards I couldn't use so I would make sure to take the one the next player needs so that they would hate draft against the player after them.  This honestly isn't much fun.  Having players talk about the great cards they took from you while you go turn after turn not seeing the stuff you need is crappy.  They usually aren't even using the cards either, just tossing them away into the trash.

The drafting part of the game also adds a lot to the duration.  With quick drafters it wouldn't be much of an issue but in all the games I played I am sure the draft added on most of an hour to the game time all in all.

I thought of a couple ways to address these concerns.  The simplest way to speed up the game is to simply not draft and just deal each player four cards.  That reduces the skill component a little but would definitely speed things up so overall I think that is a better way to play.  There is another solution though which doesn't speed the game up but which does mean that each player would be more likely to get cards they want and you would be a lot more likely to find the big payoff cards for the strategy you are employing.  The idea is that you pay for cards as soon as you draft them rather than waiting until the end of the draft and tossing cards out if you don't want them.

Right now you draft one card from each pack and usually pay to keep 1-2 of them.   The rest go in the garbage.  I would rather a system where you must pay for any card you draft at all.  Each pack would still go around the table once and you could only take 1 card from a pack when it passes you but you don't have to take a card, and if you do take one you must pay your 3 bucks for it.  This would mean that hate drafting would have a real cost, and while it sometimes would be worth it to spite people out of their cards you wouldn't end up just spiting everything by reflex.  I don't think we need to eliminate hate drafting completely, I just want to tilt the game towards positive drafting that builds your own strategy and away from constant hating.

I suspect this alternate game style would inflate scores.  You would have some money that just gets thrown out of the game when people draft and pay for cards they can't use at all but people would get their big payoff cards substantially more often and would end up with higher scores overall.  More relevantly though I think you would see new and/or weaker players actually get to have their strategies work out.  They wouldn't be so penalized for not knowing exactly what their opponents are doing (because hate drafting has a much larger cost) and they would end up with their cool stuff more often.

I really like the idea of people getting to finish off their strategies more and I am completely willing to give up some skill emphasis to achieve this.  I also think it would be a better game to teach and people just starting would enjoy it more.

I guess it says something that I have so many issues with the game and yet I am invested in trying to improve it; Terraforming Mars certainly does some things right, just not quite enough things.

Greenery

I played Terraforming Mars for the first time a little while ago and I have been mulling over my feelings on the game.  It is a competitive board game with a vaguely cooperative theme in that everyone is trying to terraform Mars as quickly as possible and the ones who do that the best win the game.

The game combines a grid of hexes representing Mars upon which everyone makes cities, lakes, and forests with a system of drafting and playing cards.  The cards have a lot going on, in that they can cost temporary resources or reduce your income, and they can generate temporary resources or permanently increase income.  There are lots of kinds of resources and income too, and also the cards have lots of symbols on them that interact with other cards.  Thankfully the design of the cards is really well done and with minimal practice you can easily figure out what each card does.

The cards seem largely well built, both in graphic design and balance.  I am not anywhere good enough at the game to make proper evaluations but my first pass was a favourable one for sure.  You can play a balanced game looking for all the best deals at a given moment or you can really go all in on one strategy and hope to cash in on the cards that reward the particular thing you are doing.

One thing I found really odd was that the main way of getting points was linked to income.  If you get a point, you also get a buck every round.  This worried me initially because it seemed like anyone who did well at the beginning would just steamroll their way to victory but there are ways to score points that don't increase income and ways to raise or lower your income without getting points, so it didn't end up being a problem.  In most games you end up either building your engine or generating points and you have to figure out when it is time to stop creating infrastructure and just start making points as the game closes down, but in Terraforming Mars you often end up just doing both at the same time. 

The game does have other ways of generating tipping points though because there are three good ways to score points that have a fixed number of them that can be cashed in.  When there are ten temperature bumps left to go nobody cares much but when you get down to the last few suddenly everyone scrambles to get their temperature bumps in before the opportunity to score off of them vanishes.

The theme of the game is well done.  For example, as terraforming proceeds the oxygen % goes up, and that means that eventually you can build cities without domes.  However, once the oxygen gets high enough you can't build a city with a dome anymore because nobody wants to live in a domed city when the air outside is breathable.  The cards reflect these sorts of things effectively and the themes feel like they tie into the mechanics in immersive and enjoyable ways.

There is one thing about the game that I don't much like though, and that is the number of cards that punish a player of your choice when you play them.  Throughout the game people would draw cards that could do something bad and then they would have to pick which person to hurt.  I don't like that mechanic in Lords of Waterdeep and it isn't any better here.  I like mechanics where you can play against another person's strategy, but cards that simply say "Pick who gets screwed" are not fun for me.  This is pretty much the only catch up mechanism in the game so I imagine with excellent players it would usually mean that the player in the lead gets beat up, but that kind of mechanic usually means that the players in last place end up kingmaking (when people are good) or people end up punishing the person they don't like (when people are bad at the game).  Neither is fun.

Overall I think the designers of the game did a great job.  The game looks slick, the information is presented effectively, and the theme is well integrated into the mechanics.  I like the way new players can be handed a faction that gives them a simple starting situation that is balanced, and I the replayability looks good.  But that card mechanic of "Pick who gets screwed" .... I don't like it.  I will play the game more times for sure to figure out what I think of it, but overall I expect it is a game I will continue to enjoy despite that one significant drawback.