Terraforming Mars vs Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition: Which Should You Buy?

Terraforming Mars is the full production. You play project cards (over 200 of them, plus 12 corporations) and each one adds another part to your economy, while out on the shared board you're flooding in oceans, grabbing city spots, and flinging asteroids at the planet. Every action feels like it's actually changing Mars, which is a big part of why fans love it so much. It's a slow build that rewards patience, and when your engine finally starts humming, it's some of the most satisfying stuff in the hobby.

Ares Expedition keeps the cards and the combo-hunting but swaps the structure. Each round everyone secretly picks a phase (build, produce, research, and so on), and only the chosen phases happen, with a bonus if you pick one your opponents also pick. Reviewers compare that little brain-pinch to Race for the Galaxy, and it's what makes the game move so fast. The trade-off is that the map is gone. No city-grabbing, no asteroid-flinging at your neighbor's plans. You're mostly tending your own garden, which is why it gets called multiplayer solitaire, and honestly, the label fits.

The original is a genuine heavy euro. It's rated Heavy for a reason: a big hand of cards invites analysis paralysis, turns can drag while someone weighs their options, and an early leader tends to snowball. First games run long and a little clumsy, and you'll want a group that's happy to spend two hours feeding a machine. There's also the components problem. You track everything with little plastic cubes on a flimsy player board, and one bumped table wipes out half your bookkeeping. A playmat or some baggies genuinely helps.

Ares Expedition is the friendlier teach by a comfortable margin. It's Medium weight, the components are cleaner, the art is much improved, and once your group gets the phase-selection rhythm, turns fly. If you've got a table that's curious about Terraforming Mars but flinches at 'heavy euro,' this is the on-ramp I'd hand them. The core decisions still have teeth, they just come at you in one-hour portions instead of two-hour ones.

Both boxes have serious staying power thanks to those 200-plus card pools. With the original, one reviewer at Meeple Mountain put in 20 games and said no two felt the same, and it sits at number nine on BoardGameGeek because that variety holds up. Player count matters, though. Two-player games drag, five-player games end before your engine really sings, and three or four is the sweet spot. On the table, the big map gives it real presence, even if the cube-tracking is fiddly for the price.

Ares Expedition has the same combo variety and a very similar sweet spot: it sings at 3-4 players, where someone else usually triggers the phase you wanted. But it's rough at two. The same phases loop until you're doing mental accounting instead of having fun, so I wouldn't buy it as a couples game. Buy it as the fast fix for a group of three or four who already know they like this kind of engine.