Depending on your point of view, this is either a Very Good Thing or a Very Bad Thing. But the sometimes hilariously bad public-domain stock photos that adorned the original cards are still very much in evidence. A few things have changed, like the symbols on the cards (‘tags’ that represent Jupiter, Earth, Science, and so on) have been standardized in nice simple outlines, and the cards themselves have been redesigned with a funky sci-fi look that reminded me of the menus in XCOM. I had a go on a pre-alpha version of Terraforming Mars that allowed play against a single AI opponent, and I found it to be an extremely faithful replication of the board game. Thankfully, all of that is taken care of for you here. For example, you might have to remember to add an animal to your Pets card every time you build a city (this game can get really weird in places). And things get really fiddly towards the end. When playing the board game, it’s all too easy to forget to, say, move the temperature marker. Huzzah! Sing Hallelujah! Oh joyous and happy day to be released from the scampering capriciousness of skating cubes!Īnother massive positive for this videogame version is that all the fiddly calculations are done for you automatically. Behold, your cube-based economy is now represented by neat little numbers running along the bottom of the screen. So one major positive for the upcoming video game version of Terraforming Mars is that it finally frees us from the tyranny of bits and their wayward travels. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that players have taken to buying or 3D printing cube overlays for Terraforming Mars to stop those pesky cubes from wandering off, with a full set sometimes costing as much as the game itself. Even worse, the game boards appear to have been manufactured from a kind of futuristic frictionless cardboard that ensures your cube-based economy will be scattered to the four corners of the Earth (er, Mars?) by even the slightest passing breeze. Unfortunately, all this environment-manipulating fun means that Terraforming Mars requires approximately one gazillion tiny cubes (figures may be rounded) to keep track of everything from how much heat you’ve generated to how many plants you’ve got. Every time you modify the planet like this, you increase your terraform rating. You play as one of a suite of mega-corporations, each with a unique ability, and the game sees you playing cards to do things like seed the planet with algae to generate oxygen or crash an asteroid onto the surface to raise the temperature. The basic aim is to accrue the highest 'terraform rating' by, er, terraforming Mars the most. This massively popular strategy game was released in 2016, and it’s currently sitting at number five in the BoardGameGeek top 100. Terraforming Mars suffers more from calamity Harolds than most board games. “Harold, you absolute numpty, what have you done? Can anyone remember how much wool I have?” When they’re not being eaten by the dog, they’re being ricocheted off the walls by a careless dice roll or nudged into oblivion by inebriated players slamming into the table on their way back from the loo. On the other hand, what a motherclucking pain in the posterior they are. On the one hand, the tactile sensation of slamming down a plastic train in Ticket to Ride, cutting off your opponent’s train route to their howls of anguish, is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and a feeling that’s near impossible to replicate in videogames. You know, bits - those fiddly counters, miniatures and cubes of plastic, wood or metal (oooh, fancy). Bits are both the joy and bane of board games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |