A Game of Classic Science Fiction: Terraforming Mars by Jacob Fryxelius
About a year ago, I added Terraforming Mars to my collection of board games, fascinated by the premise. At the very end of the year, a local friend proposed to get together and try playing it. On 2 January, three of us sat down to a first game, using the beginner option of everyone playing a standard corporation and keeping all ten of their initial cards without having to pay for them. Four and a half hours later, we started counting up scores.
Terraforming Mars is a game about economic investment and its returns, like Race for the Galaxy, one of my long-time favorites. The premise is fairly hard science fiction: Several corporations have been granted charters by Earth’s world government to begin — as the title says — terraforming the planet Mars: raising its temperature and oxygen and giving it bodies of water. When these reach specific designated values, the game ends and score is taken. There are no violations of fundamental laws of physics such as faster-than-light travel; the departure, so far as there is one is not qualitative but quantitative, in the rapid progress of terraforming, though in some compensation, play is divided into “generations,” which implies a time scale on the order of centuries.
