Terraforming Mars board game review: is it worth buying?

Terraforming Mars uses a production grid where each player tracks 6 resource types (megacredits, steel, titanium, plants, energy, heat) and their production rates. Project cards bought from a hand of 4 per generation modify resource production, place tiles on the Mars board and advance the three global parameters (temperature, oxygen, ocean).

Victory points come from terraforming milestones (50 megacredits each to claim), awards (at game end for leading in specific metrics) and from cards with VP symbols. The game ends when all three global parameters reach their maximum values.

At $60, Terraforming Mars is the most complex game in this guide and rewards multiple plays to master the card interactions.

Terraforming Mars Prelude adds 35 prelude project cards and 5 new corporation cards. At the start of the game, each player selects 2 prelude cards from 4 dealt options, receiving immediate resource production boosts and board placements that skip the slow first-generation build-up.

The expansion reduces average play time from 2.5 to 3 hours to approximately 2 hours without reducing strategic depth. Prelude is widely considered the best quality-of-life expansion for the base game.

At $20 for the Prelude expansion, the total investment for base plus Prelude is $80 for a significantly improved game experience.

Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition is a standalone card game (no board required) that uses simultaneous action selection instead of sequential turns. Each player simultaneously chooses one of 5 action phases, and only players who selected each phase take that phase's action, which creates strategic guessing around what opponents will choose.

The 208 project cards carry the same engine-building depth as the base game without the board management overhead. Play time is 60 to 90 minutes for a 2 to 4 player game.

At $45, Ares Expedition is the Terraforming Mars experience for groups who want the card engine without the 3-hour commitment.

Hellas and Elysium adds two double-sided board sections that replace the standard Tharsis map in the base game. Hellas features a southern Mars map with a large crater area for ocean placement and south pole bonuses. Elysium covers the opposite side of Mars with different bonus placements and 5 unique milestone requirements.

Each map favors different strategic priorities for city, ocean and forest placement, making established tile-placement strategies from the Tharsis map less directly applicable. The milestones and awards are different for each map.

At $20, Hellas and Elysium is the content expansion for players who have played Terraforming Mars at least 10 to 15 times and want geographic variety.