![]() ![]() And the main thing that separates it is that, while in Race for the Galaxy cards are multiuse-both the things you build and the currency you need to pay for them-here, resources and cards are separate. But while the structure is (one might say eerily) similar, the feel of a round in Ares Expedition is quite different. I've read several comments comparing this game to Race for the Galaxy, and when you've got this round structure, that makes sense. Only chosen phases activate in a round, and they activate in order. ![]() One phase lets you get new cards, two phases let you play cards, one phase produces resources, and one phase lets you trade those resources in for points. Players secretly and simultaneously choose one phase that will activate for all players, but the choosing player gets a bonus. ![]() While Terraforming Mars followed the "players perform actions until everyone passes" mold, the round structure in Ares Expedition is.well, mostly cribbed from Race for the Galaxy. Your goal as a corporation is to skillfully play these cards to build your brand on the Red Planet. The meat of the game is the deck of project cards, which has 208 unique cards divided into three colors: green development cards (which enhance your production of money, heat, and plants as well as your stores of titanium and steel), red event cards (sweeping one-off occurrences that can cause big changes to the face of Mars-for a price), and blue active cards, which provide ongoing abilities or actions you can perform. (The title is a little on the nose.) Each corporation has a special ability-some way that they are specifically trying to shape Mars to their advantage-and while the game ends once the three global terraforming parameters, to which all players contribute, are achieved, the winner is the player with the most points, gained, yes, by contributing to the global terraforming project but also by organizing their own projects in their own niche. In Ares Expedition, as in the larger game, players are corporations from Earth tasked with, well, terraforming Mars. It's just that many of the parts that I found boring are now either abstracted away (the tile play) or streamlined (the slow turns) by the new action-selection structure. It's just that, in this case, it feels less like a stripping back to the bone and more like Terraforming Mars on a weight-loss plan.Īres Expedition, like its ancestor, is full of cards, and these cards offer production opportunities, unique actions, and ongoing abilities. Ares Expedition is a shorter, simpler version of the larger game. Usually in hobby circles, "the card game" is shorthand for "shorter, simpler skeleton of the larger game," and I suppose that in some way fits here. In a word, I needed it to be Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition.Īres Expedition is, according to the box, "the Terraforming Mars card game," but that tagline can be misleading. I recognize why people love it, but for my taste, I needed it to be shorter, snappier, and to remove the occasional take that broadsides for me to do the same. It was slow, given to some unevenness unless you drafted (which slowed the game down even more), and (in my estimation) was mostly multiplayer solitaire-that is, until you were occasionally, unexpectedly bashed in the back with the take-that hammer. Well, since writing that review, I have played it more with other players, and I still don't like the multiplayer game much. It was a frustrating experience, yet I still kind of wanted to play it more with other players. ![]() My relationship with Terraforming Mars is kind of like that.My conclusion in the review was that, while I really like the solitaire play of Terraforming Mars, I just didn't care for it with other players at the table. The girlfriend is nice enough, but it seems she and your friend fight all the time, and you can’t understand why they’re together in the first place, but you find it even harder to believe that after breaking up again and again, they keep finding themselves back together. A friend of yours has a boyfriend or girlfriend that…you just don’t understand the relationship. You’ve probably experienced it at some point. ![]()
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