Overview
Fryxelius's design is the game most credited with resetting the mid-weight euro market away from worker-placement and toward card-driven engines. You play a corporation with a hand of project cards, using them to raise Mars' temperature, oxygen, and ocean coverage until the planet is habitable. Every generation you draw four cards, keep the ones you can afford, and slowly compile an engine that pays out for the last third of the game.
The joy of Terraforming Mars is discovery. A hand of ten cards from a deck of 233 can put you in a build almost nobody at the table has seen before. The card synergies are earned but generous. Thermalists chain to heat production, plants chain to greenery, buildings chain to steel. And finding a combo mid-game is one of the small unrepeatable pleasures of the hobby.
The flaws are real. The base game's balance is patchy (some corporations are much stronger than others). Random card draw can and does swing games. Play time creeps toward three hours at four players. And the Prelude expansion, which most reviewers now consider essential, does a lot of work to fix the base game's slow opening. Buy the base + Prelude together; do not buy the base alone.
