“If a blade of grass on Mars is priceless, what is the value of a human being?”

Carl Sagan

Welcome to Three Colors: Red, a triple review of some of the major Mars board games of the past few years. Want to know which one you should pack for interstellar travel? Finalize checklists; it’s time to launch.

1. Red

When we go to Mars, we’ll undoubtedly send our absolute best; decades of engineering and expertise. It’s fitting then that First Martian’s production value is superlative; its cardboard is some of the nicest I’ve ever punched; everything feels wonderful to handle, and the app is clean and helpful.

Unlike the components, your habitat (represented by the above console) will often fail - leaving you scrambling to decide what to fix and what can be left broken as you try to complete Mission Control’s objectives in time.

Loss aversion is the cognitive paradox that explains why the sadness we feel from losing 100 dollars is worse than the happiness we gain from finding 100 dollars. It’s why Agricola is nicknamed Misery Farm - because our brain can’t stand the idea of all the points we’re losing, all the options we’re not taking. In Ignacy’s previous game based on this engine, Robinson Crusoe, you started with nothing and painstakingly crafted a habitat. In this game, you start with a habitat and everything painstakingly falls apart. Despite the two things being mechanically and functionally equivalent, the emotional response is starkly different.

I like many things about First Martians. The components. The setting. The sense of scale and how short each session is to play. You get to drive a car on Mars! You get to live on Mars!

Of the three games, this one has the most intimate, personal scale, and I like that a lot. I fear that a lot of people might not see First Martians for what it is: A light-medium resource management/storytelling game about people making the best of bad situations.

First Martians I think needed to work a little harder on its disconnections: That board looks like a hypercomplex fiddly game; it’s not. Why are astronauts having fights and causing physical wounds to each other? Surely they’re more professional than that.

Calling it PTSD rather than anemia might have gone a long way to helping the believability.

I praised the app but I feel the game automates the wrong things. The app tells you what breaks and what events happen in the game, but all of the things you’d rather a computer do - move counters up and down tracks, tell you which component is broken - it doesn’t, making a lot of what you do in the game feel like busywork. I don’t want to fiddle with cubes, I want to drive cars on Mars! I want to grow plants instead of counting oxygen trackers!

Everything leading up to its release made it sound like a tense, tightly wound eurogame set on the Martian hellscape - when it’s in fact an excellent light co-op game of immersion and crisis, where you and perhaps one other person can make hard calls and curse the dice together as you roll through a couple of scenarios in an hour. I’m glad I own it and I dearly wish to play through the entirety of both its campaigns - just because what it gets right it gets so right.

I hope there’s more content or even fixes for the game coming. It’s a game I want to return to - mainly just so I can drive my car on Mars.

Seriously, you have no idea how much I love driving those things.

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2. Blue

Martians: A Story of Civilization is a worker placement eurogam- wait, no, come back!

Setting it apart from Every Other Worker Placement is, well, the setting. Mars is a harsh rock and most of your time will still be spent trying to eke together food, energy, and materials - but also the way turns are measured: not in workers, but in time.

Each player has 3 astronaut meeples AND 3 time to spend per turn. So if you sent 1 astronaut to spend all 3 of your time in the Construction Facility, that’s your turn. This mechanic alone makes it one of my favorite worker placement eurogames, never mind it’s also a hard science game that looks like this.

If you sent 3 astronauts to spend 1 time each at 3 different facilities, that’s also your turn. Recalling astronauts costs 1 time, so careful meeple management is a major aspect of this game, including making sure that important spaces are free for your friends to use (in the co-op mode) or blocked off at key times (in competitive). Oh yes, did I mention the co-op mode? Because IT HAS CO-OP MODE.

There’s shades of Misery Farm as players do their best to upgrade farms and labs to provide enough food, water, medicine, and energy to survive another one of Mars’ unforgivable days - Whether you’re drilling through the Martian regolith for minerals or building solar panels to hedge against windless days, there’s always something to do to keep busy, but it’s a nice change of pace to be counting resources and planning actions as friends

I’ve never played this game competitively and I don’t know that I ever plan to; the rules imply a game of seriously cut-throat competition (any game that lets you trade VICTORY POINTS is surely hardcore). Despite all this, the game really nails the theme and feels excellent to play; talking together over the puzzle of which actions to do when.

There’s drawbacks for sure; Martians is hard to find, and the first version of the rulebook is rougher than a bumpy rover ride (the updated rulebook is great though and is available online.) There’s also these incredible building minis that cost as much as the game themselves which I so dearly wish I have.

The game is a brain tickler of a worker placement with great art, lovely gameplay, and is without question my favorite game of the three - I just want to cosy up in the hab and do oxygen research all day. This is the closest worker placement has come to making me feel like I wanted to live in its world.

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3. Green

In March 2016, a time travel pod crashed into my bathroom.

‘Calvin!’ the occupant exclaimed in a clatter of falling tiles and oozing shampoo. ‘Later this year there will be a game about making Mars livable through technology! It’s based entirely on hard science and lets you nuke the planet to make lakes and populate the planet with penguins!’

‘Oh my god!’ I shouted at what was clearly future me. ‘That ticks every single one of my boxes! What else can you tell me?!’

Future Calvin clapped a hand on my shoulder, and gave a deep, time-travely sigh.

‘You won’t like it.’

Terraforming Mars should have been a dime landing; instead I bounced off it like an orbiter ricocheting off the upper atmosphere. I so dearly wanted to like it; I gleefully lined up all my cubes, I thought very hard about my cards while drafting them. I built an engine of plants and bacteria and deftly executed my plans, blasting my point total into the stratosphere…

And then, for the entire second half of the game, I drifted in orbit, fully on autopilot. Nothing any of the other players did had any impact on me or what I was doing - I found myself talking to people drifting in from other tables in between turns - when it came back to me I would play the top card in my pre-arranged hand and go back to talking about Netrunner or whatever - and then I won by like 30 points.

Terraforming Mars is a fantastic engine builder about working together to make Mars liveable - but it never makes its players work together. Sure you might ride along on someone else’s coattails as they raise the O2 level or grow a forest and the narrative of what you’re doing (Hi I will slam a freaking moon into the planet) plucks right at my hardsci heartstrings, but poking and prodding at the design reveals two issues that push it gently but firmly outside of my gravitational pull - the first of which is outlined above. Much as space seems to be lonely and desolate, I firmly believe that a space game should be able work with (or even against) other people, and Terraforming Mars doesn’t let me do that enough.

The other is drafting. I’ve never loved drafting and I probably never will, especially with how many things you have to keep track of in this game and how often I felt that sometimes you got screwed anyway. Oh hey I should probably pay to keep Blue from getting this card that plays right into their plans - oh never mind they got a better one. The huge deck also incentivizes memorization of its contents, which is fine for longtime players but I think really alienates newer explorers.

I really wish there had been an open market system or some other form of card assignment, even though drafting does feel like a cool thematic concession to the inherent capitalism of private corporations (no, we decline to fund your bears on Mars program, go take it to our competitors instead). Instead I felt frustrated that I had to make decisions on little information, and I sense a runaway leader issue with players of unequal skill as one corp manages to cobble together a far better engine than everyone else.

I’m glad that Terraforming Mars is a smash hit. I genuinely think it is a good, deep game that rewards multiple plays and lots and lots of learning with the same group. Maybe one day I’ll try it again with all seventeen expansions bolted on - but I think deep down in my heart what I really want is a reboot of the same idea that involves powered walkers seeding crops and finding just the right angle to line up our solar farm - Terraforming One Small Area of Mars, if you will. It’s amazing what a slight reduction in scope can do to the intensity of emotion in a game, and my hope is that future endeavor will light the fire in my heart that Terraforming Mars promised to, but ultimately did not.

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Thank you for reading Three Colors: Red. I don’t know any better way to end the review than leave you with this.

“Maybe we're on Mars because we have to be, because there's a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you.”

Carl Sagan

Three Colors: Red. A triple review of Mars-themed board games

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