Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is a spin off of the hugely successful Terraforming Mars. The background story is the same. You are mega corporations working on making Mars habitable. Three things need to be achieved. You need to create oceans. You need to increase the atmospheric temperature. You need to increase the oxygen level. Once all three are achieved, the game ends, and whoever has the most points wins.

In this game dice represent resources. There are dice in five different colours, and depending on the side you roll, a die represents a different resource. Some resources are rarer than others. For example, on a blue die, the energy resource is on three of the faces, the water resource on two, and the oxygen resource on only one. 

At the start of the game, you have some production capability. That means whenever you perform production, you can take some dice and roll them. They become resources you can spend to play cards. You have a hand of five cards. They need specific resources to be played. Some cards increase your production, allowing you to take more dice whenever you do production. Some cards have special abilities, for example, allowing you to turn dice to other faces. Some cards let you increase one of the terraforming parameters. By doing this you will score points. You will also change the face of Mars itself, adding ocean, forest, and even city tiles. Whenever you add a tile to the board, you gain some resource or ability. These help you further perform other actions.

There are some public goals which players compete over. For example, having a certain number of production cards. Only the first player to achieve an objective scores it. Some resource icons on played cards will score points at the end of the game. That is also something you can plan for because you know which icons are involve from the beginning.

 

This is a light to medium weight engine building game. In the early game, you’ll probably want to play production cards that let you produce more resources. Gradually, you will switch to playing cards that score points for you. There are ways to manipulate dice. You want to use them efficiently to get the right cards played at the right time. Whenever you do production, you can choose to discard any number of cards and then draw up to your hand limit. Although there is some luck in whether you draw suitable cards you need at each stage of the game, the ability to discard and redraw helps in mitigating that luck. 

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is pleasant. You generate resources and then you spend them to play cards. I did not find it captivating. It is inoffensive and it works. Just not particularly engaging for me. There is much variety in the resources (five die colours and three possible faces for each = 15) and it’s not easy to get the right resources for your cards. You need to cleverly use card powers and basic actions to get the right resource types. The game does present some challenge. It is also satisfying to build your little engine that can produce much and do nifty stuff.