So whoever sends their fleet first gets the goodies. The big thing I noticed about adding colonies is that the first-player token is more important than ever because every colony can only be visited by one trade fleet. Weird oversight, but they’re called out super specifically in the rulebook. There are three colonies that don’t produce anything without a starting colony, and they’re not marked as such in any way whatsoever. Every tracker ticks up at the end of every round. Then the tracker resets to as low as it can be set (the established colonies force the tracker cube higher on the track). Whoever gets their trade fleet to the colony cashes in, and everyone who established a colony there will also get some goodies. I suspect the very hardest-core TM players will have already evaluated that the colonies are dangerous distractions from the business of ripping through the terraforming process as efficiently as possible, but I got my all-time highest score in a 3p game last night and I’m completely certain it was due to the colonies.Įach round, the production of every colony (with three weird exceptions that I’ll note below) ticks up. There’s a new Standard Project action, which is to colonize a moon (each player can colonize each moon once) and a new action to send a trade fleet to trigger the moon’s production. Then we each get a trade fleet token (little white arrow with a cube-hole to mark it as ours). The corp I had last night, new to Colonies, adds another colony of my choice (ye gawds, one more critical decision to make). There’s a deck of colonies from which you’ll start with 2 + the number of players.

Getting the game rolling is like a 20 minute affair now, but it definitely starts with a bang once it does.įor the record, I adored the Colonies expansion. Incorporating new setup steps has also made just starting the game kind of a hassle: now we need to decide which of three maps we’re playing on, and set up the Venus side board, and set up a tableau of freestanding space colonies and its side board, and finally work out your perfect starting combination of corporation, prelude pair and project cards. Each expansion, barring Prelude, has just stretched that out even longer. Almost every game I’ve ever played with this many expansions (CCGs excepted) has usually jumped the shark by the third of fourth.īasic Terraforming Mars is already a fairly complex, fairly long-play affair. And Prelude, chef kiss! And then Colonieslast night. Baseline TM was good, but adding Hellas & Elysiumwas better. We keep written win records, for crying out loud. Terraforming Mars has been a huge hit here for a year, now. I have a very bad habit of snagging any and every expansion for most of the board games I have here and then letting them collect dust for weeks or months.

Haven’t played Terraforming Marsfor many weeks, but I remembered I had the Colonies expansion sitting in the box.

Terraforming mars expansion list