Terraforming Mars Doesn't Fit on My Table, Literally

Solo mode is most of what I know of this game, since most weeks up here the only opponent available is whatever the automa deck deals me. It holds up fine that way, racing the temperature and oxygen tracks against yourself before the window fogs over for the night. Wished a couple times there was a sharper AI to push against instead of just a scoring bar, that’s my one complaint on the solo side, but a real timer beats “beat your own score” every time and this is the former.

Problem is the room. Fourteen by fourteen feet, one table, and this game wants more of it than I’ve got. The main board, the player mats, the little stacks of resource cubes, it all sprawls, and the second issue compounds the first: those cardboard player mats are dead flat and the cubes slide right off them if the table gets bumped, which mine does, wind does that up here. A few people online fixed it with plexiglass overlays from Etsy, wooden ones too, and I get why, though I’m not hauling extra acrylic four miles up a trail for a game I mostly solo.

The engine building itself earns the reputation. Cards synergize in ways that actually reward planning three turns out, and the corporations give enough asymmetry that replays don’t feel like the same puzzle twice. At higher counts the downtime gets real, several people who play it at five said as much, one dropped straight to four players and never looked back, and I believe them, watching one runaway engine take fifteen minutes on a turn while everyone else waits sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would grate on a person with limited daylight.

Rating a 4. Would be a 5 if a plastic tray existed for the cube-slide problem in the base box, and if the thing packed down smaller. As it stands it eats most of my table for three hours, which up here means nothing else happens that day, weather included.