Terraforming Mars review

FryxGames | 1 to 5 players | 12+ | 120 minutes

Somewhere in the second century of the modern board game era, a Swedish chemist with a PhD and a family full of enthusiastic playtesters sat down with a question: what if making an entire planet habitable was, at its core, an accounting problem?

Jacob Fryxelius spent six years answering that question. The result was Terraforming Mars, a game in which you play a corporation. Not a hero, not a faction, not a plucky band of rebels, but a corporation, competing with other corporations to raise the temperature, pump oxygen into the atmosphere and flood the surface of Mars. You do this by playing cards. Hundreds of them. Cards representing everything from importing nitrogen to breeding livestock to crashing asteroids into the planet's surface. That last one is the kind of town planning you only get away with when nobody lives there yet.

The goal is shared. The glory is not.

How it really works

Each round (a generation, because the game has ambitions) you buy project cards, play project cards, and watch your production engine slowly gather the resources you need to… play even more project cards. There are six types of resource. Steel makes buildings cheaper. Titanium makes space projects cheaper. Plants eventually become greenery tiles. Energy turns into heat. Heat raises the temperature. MegaCredits buy everything else, and at no point will you have enough of them.

The board is a hexagonal grid of Mars. You place oceans, cities and greenery on it, collect bonuses and block your opponents from the spots they wanted. Three global parameters (temperature, oxygen and ocean coverage) creep upwards over the course of the game. When all three reach their maximum, Mars is terraformed, the game ends, and everyone counts their points with the quiet intensity of tax accountants at the end of the tax year.

Your corporation gives you a unique starting position. Ecoline is good with plants. Tharsis Republic profits from cities. Inventrix is not too fussy about the laws of nature, or at least about card requirements. The corporate draft (technically optional, universally used) lets you choose between two corporations at the start, which is how the game makes you responsible for your own fate before you have even had a turn.¹

¹ There is something beautifully ‘corporate’ about being handed two business plans and told to pick the least disappointing one.

What it does well

The engine. It is all about the engine.

Terraforming Mars understands that the deepest pleasure in board games lies in the moment a rickety, improvised contraption starts to work. Your first few generations are lean and desperate. You buy cards you cannot yet afford to play, invest in production that will only pay off three rounds from now, and watch your opponents do the same while pretending not to be worried. Then, somewhere around generation five or six, the engine kicks in. Your titanium production feeds your space cards, which generate science tags, which unlock your research bonuses, which let you draw more cards, which… well. You get the idea. The snowball is rolling.

The card pool is enormous and almost entirely unique. More than two hundred project cards in the base game, each with a slightly different effect, and they work together in ways the designer clearly spent years honing and players will spend years discovering. You can play fifty games before you come across a particular two-card combo that makes you sit up straight.

And then there is the theme. Terraforming Mars is that rare game where the mechanisms are the theme. When you convert plants into greenery tiles that raise the oxygen level, you are not performing an abstract action that happens to carry a thematic label. You are actually doing it. You are greening Mars. The temperature track starts at minus thirty and climbs in steps of two degrees, and every step feels like progress because it is progress. Fryxelius's chemistry background shows in the way every conversion chain is scientifically sound, or at least scientifically plausible, which is more than most games deign to manage.

The solo mode deserves a mention. Playing against a timer that raises the global parameters every generation, racing to terraform Mars before the neutral corporations beat you to it: that is one of the better solo experiences in the hobby. It captures the frantic energy of a start-up with a deadline and no safety net.

What we liked less

Let us talk about the art.

Isaac Fryxelius, Jacob's brother, handled the visuals, and the result is what happens when a family project meets a two-hundred-card deadline. Some cards have beautiful original illustrations. Others have stock photos that look as if they were acquired at three in the morning. One card shows a stunning Martian landscape; the next a photo of a cow that seems to come from a catalogue of veterinary supplies. The visual experience is less “coherent artistic vision” and more “group presentation where everyone made their own slides separately.”

The player boards are thin cardboard. That would merely be disappointing, were it not that the game requires you to place small plastic cubes on them to track six different resources and six different production values. Bump the table. Breathe too enthusiastically. A cat walks through a room three streets away. Your cubes shift. Your production tracks become archaeological puzzles, and nobody can remember whether they were producing three or four steel. The aftermarket player board overlay industry exists because of Terraforming Mars, and it is thriving.

Then there is the playing time. The box says 120 minutes. The box is an optimist. With five players and the draft variant you are looking at three hours, possibly more if someone at the table tends to read every card twice before choosing. Analysis paralysis is not a bug in Terraforming Mars; it is a feature the game accidentally bred by making every decision genuinely interesting. Which, when you think about it, is both the problem and the compliment.

The iconography demands commitment. New players will spend their first game with the reference card in one hand and a growing sense of inadequacy in the other. The symbols make sense once you know them, in the way a foreign alphabet makes sense once you know it. That is to say: cold comfort while you are learning.

Who is this for?

If you are the type of person who has ever felt genuine satisfaction watching a spreadsheet recalculate automatically, this game was made for you. That is not an insult. It is a love language, and Terraforming Mars speaks it fluently.

It is a game for people who would rather build than destroy. For players who want their decision on turn three to still matter on turn fifteen. For anyone who has ever looked at Mars on a clear evening and thought not “how beautiful,” but “how fixable.”

It is less suited to groups who want constant interaction, fast play or consistent art direction. Players who find engine-building meditative will love it. Players who find it repetitive will check out by generation four and spend the remaining ninety minutes wondering why they did not suggest Ticket to Ride.

Our verdict

Terraforming Mars has sat near the top of the world rankings for almost ten years, and has earned that position the same way the corporations earn their terraform rating: slowly, methodically, one good decision at a time. The art is inconsistent. The player boards are a scandal. The game occasionally lingers a whole generation too long.

None of that matters when the engine kicks in.

You play a card that triggers a chain of effects you planned three generations ago. You place a greenery tile on exactly the hex that turns your opponent's city into your victory points. You watch the temperature track pass zero and feel, utterly absurdly, warm.

The most beautiful spreadsheet on the Red Planet, and the only game in which crashing an asteroid into a planet counts as community service.