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Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition
All the card-combo joy of Terraforming Mars, with the two-hour slog sanded off.
Designed by Jacob Fryxelius, Nick Little, and Sydney Engelstein · 2021
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A genuinely fun engine-builder that fixes the original's pacing and fiddliness, as long as you're not here for the head-to-head map fight. Best at 3-4, rough at two.
Best for: Engine-building fans who want a Terraforming Mars fix in about an hour
What it is
Here's the pitch. You're a corporation racing to make Mars livable, raising the oxygen, the temperature, and the oceans by playing project cards that bolt onto each other into a glorious money-printing machine. If you've played the original Terraforming Mars, you know the engine-building high. This is that, minus the giant board and the two-hour commitment. Over 200 project cards, and the real joy is hunting the combos that quietly break the whole thing open.
The catch
The clever bit is how turns work. Each round everyone secretly picks a phase (build, produce, research, and so on), and only the chosen phases happen. Pick one your opponents also pick, and you get a bonus. Reviewers compare the brain-pinch to Race for the Galaxy, and most agree it sings at 3-4 players, where someone else usually triggers the phase you wanted. The catch: it leans toward multiplayer solitaire, so you're mostly tending your own garden and barely glancing at theirs.
Who it's for
So who's it for. If you loved Terraforming Mars but hated babysitting a two-hour game, this is your fix, and players widely call it the better experience for the time. Just know two things going in. At two players it gets repetitive, with the same phases looping until you're doing mental accounting instead of having fun. And if you came for the map, the city-grabbing, the asteroid-flinging, that's gone. Bring three or four people and it really hums.
What other players say
This write-up is grounded in real reviews and player discussion, not just one opinion. A few worth reading:
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