On Mars Review - As Complex as Board Games Get

on Mars is the most complicated game Veta la serda has ever made if you enjoyed this review there are many more that you can watch on our channel but if you appreciate what we do please consider donating we work so hard on our videos this one alone took us three months hope you enjoyed it bye bye bye we were this close to not making this a joke and just ending the video right there we didn't because it would be childish and irresponsible but honestly for about 95% of you this would have been enough information to make up your mind on Mars is as hefty as Vita Lacerta can make and hefty is his default mode and that's all you need to know you're either gonna run for the hills or run towards the amazon tab on your browser however on Mars stands out as a touch different from his other work and that's worth exploring but first let's give you an overview of the systems I thought you were going to do it no you do it you're so much better at giving an overview than me in a video for so long and I think our viewers really deserve you know this special look I'll give you a 10 and do the washing up for a week on Mars is a worker placement game where you place workers on Mars or wait for it in space these dinky purple people are your purple people they live in a purple shelter made out of wind more on that later and they'll go do purple work for you imagine that this is you you're a happy-go-lucky person and your name is mr. snuggles you've heard of worker placement before you've played Agricola and a confident that it's as simple as placing a worker on a space and doing the action depicted on it well I've got some bad news for you because you've just rung the wrong board game bell and opened the door is about do spaces require a worker yes they do accept some spaces don't you just choose to do the action and then do it okay but if a space requires a worker do you place it on this space yes you do except in cases what you want to do the same action more than once you then send extra workers to the break room including on spaces where you don't have to place a worker to begin with our space is blocked by the workers you put on them no absolutely not they just increase the cost of going there and then you have to send even more workers to the break room based on how many other players are present and also play account except for spaces that actually do get blocked by workers congratulations we've just gone through about 2% of the rulebook going through the minutiae of rules in this game in the video review is pointless we would be here forever except we wouldn't because you'd get bored and stop watching instead let's focus on what makes on Mars interesting and the heart of this game lies a conundrum do you get down and dirty on Mars or do you stay cool and coy in orbit the border on Mars is split evenly into two half the actions belong to the orbit side and the other half belong to the surface at the end of each round a shuttle will travel sometimes it will travel between the two locations and sometimes it'll just edge itself closer towards that transition if you happen to be on the right side when the shuttle is transitioning then you can hitch a free ride because here's the thing you can only perform actions on this side where your astronaut is on initially you might think huh that's an interesting proposition I'll have to plan in advance how many and which actions I want to take on both sides so I can finish my work and tie my exit just right but then you realize that's not what the actual puzzle is and all you really want to do is stay in the one place that really matters Mars offers bases that are much more import and lucrative when it comes to scoring points here you'll cool down Rockets to bring more workers higher scientists that will give you free access to what the game calls executive actions but are effectively bonus things that you can do on your turn build various facilities populating the surface of Mars and crucially providing a major way to get some of those points and also there's a space that lets you drive around a little robot BB that's not to say that the colony spaces are unimportant no no no for example here you could get tagged this will go onto your player board and make your future actions better if you've got a tech for better rockets the further you advance it the more workers you can welcome when a new rocket lands but tech or similarly advanced building blueprints are things that you only need to get once after that you will want to be where the action is and the action is on Mars basically it's a bit like the opposite of that film you know the Martian because a you're not Matt Damon and B you want to spend as much time on this red planet as possible unless you are Matt Damon Matt are you watching this the problem is you can't stay on Mars forever you'll either run out of resources or you'll need another blueprint all you'll need to advance your tech and thus you'll circle the drain until you find just the right moment to catch a ship and pull yourself out or be consumed by the greed and ever-present desire to do just one more building action so what is it about the surface of this planet that has such a strong gravitational pull that it drives your decisions towards pure obsession if the turn-to-turn puzzle is figuring out where to learn and what actions to take then the key to solving that puzzle is this bit of the board right here this clunky wooden piece that looks like a pair of misshapen glasses represents your colony as in everything you've built together with the other players and your colony has a level does that level do everything as the game progresses your colony level advances but only when the growth makes it logically expand each time you build a water plant a farm a power plant or an oxygen generator you advance the requisite marker on the colony level chart if all of these markers meet or exceed the column level it advances advancing the colony level does a lot of things it lets you welcome more ships which in turn lets you bring in more workers it moves the game clock inevitably pushing the whole affair towards a conclusion but those are just byproducts of what you're trying to achieve let's take a brief detour in the olden bgg days of yore games used to fall into one of two categories eurogames type mechanical puzzles with little interaction or a merry trash games dicey Chucky good tiny things that were often quite reliant upon luck and stabbing your friends in the back this polar division is of little use in 2020 because what a decade ago was a foundational basis now has blossomed into something more games had years and years to grow and mold themselves into a multitude of different directions strictly speaking on Mars is euro game but if we're gonna snap on labels let's make it a little more useful on a bi-directional spectrum it would actually end up somewhere over here of course there's very little luck involved there's no dice to determine random outcomes and almost everything is open information which is why on this scale we would place it on this side but when it comes to tension and confrontation a predominant way of scoring points is building buildings each game these four building types will receive a random token that tells you what you'll score points for when you build them in this example if I deploy a water plan I'll score two points for each robot I have built but I'll only get points if before building it the number of water plants was below the colony level your Eurogamer brain wants to solve this puzzle in a simple way you'll build lots of robots at the start of the game to set up your engine and then you build lots of water-plants to score points from them except of course on Mars doesn't let you have it that simple the window of opportunity is as thin as Moses atmosphere if you spend too long building robots someone will build the water plant before you can you can't build another water plant but aside from letting you some resources the rewards are literally non-existent you'll have to wait until all the other requisite buildings are established to advance the colony level and open that window of opportunity one more time and your best hope you're on the right side of Mars when that happens it's a novel juxtaposition using an established genre with all its trappings but creating a play environment that punishes you if you indulge too much in it making matters trickier is that having something built is the most involved action imaginable and requires a lot of preparation first you need a robot then that robot can only build underneath themselves or one space next to them they can either extend an existing confluence of the same type of buildings or build somewhere that is exactly one space apart from the same type of building because plunking down these structures is very much a race you have to have your robot ready to go but what if it isn't well you can take the move robots and Rovers action which of course takes up your action for the round and then you're hoping that nobody steals your opportunity until your turn comes back to you oh you could spend crystals little in the game our executive actions extra possibilities to do something on your turn as long as you can master the crystal cost some are a standard set available from the start of the game on your player board then you can unlock more by welcoming ships each time you do you'll get to take a ship off of your choice giving you extra options for extra turns if that wasn't enough options you can also take blueprints when you take these you'll get a resource but that's just by the by now you're scoring negative points at the end of the game but if you develop this blueprint into an actual facility you will score positive points and it will also give you you guessed it a new executive action and then finally you need to pay a resource for the building that you're building but naturally it cannot be the same resource as depicted on the building instead it has to be plucked from what we like to call lizard as hierarchy of humans and elements all makes energy energy makes water water makes plants plants make farts fonts make people and people thoughts or it's the circle of thoughts of course this stage you might ask me but Alain if I wanted to play an opportunistic euro why would I not just play Concordia which is still consistently excellent doesn't cost an arm and a leg and doesn't take an hour to teach the new players great question and the answer is well you see why wouldn't they just play Concordia I don't know preference functionally yes they are games cut from the same cloth but whilst Concordia is all about pivoting at the right moment Amar's is a bit like piloting a racecar it's still about split-second decisions but so much of it is about the prep that your engineers put in beforehand and how much mental stamina you're willing to exert in Concordia you are the driver in on Mars you're the entire team at the end of the day if you can't be bothered with complexity then you can't be bothered with complexity but I think it would be reductive to say that it's complexity just four complexities sake in fairness we barely even touched on some of the more involved elements of on Mars but each of them is a delight and a unique flavor mixed into a very rich salad take technology for example like in many other games you can acquire unique skills and advance them the trick is that each technology that you advance can be used by anyone on the table oh I see you've upgraded your Rover and may very fast and now you can zip around the surface collecting various technologies thank you very much I will also now use it for free what but that's my technology I fed it i watered it I changed its diapers if I use F cos tech he'll get a bit of wind which you can keep or immediately spend to advance the technology I've just used that way everyone gets a little bit of everything I'll get access to a technology that I didn't have to put anything in to maintain and you and I won't have to change any more diapers why I put in a lot of work into that this symbiotic relationship is further accentuated by advanced buildings that you upgrade from blueprints if you recall upgrading this blueprint into a living breathing baby boy Nets you a new executive action to take this executive action you can as per usual pay the cost via crystals or instead you can employ a scientist better yet that scientist doesn't just let you perform that action for free they'll let you hop over to other player's blueprints and give you access to their exclusive executive actions something that is normally verboten take the game's victory points which are renamed into opportunity points yes on Mars is one of those euro games that decided to rename victory points under the pretense of making them more thematic and yes it's really annoying when designers do this because it seems like a vain attempt to disguise something more mundane but here it kind of works the astounding miracle isn't just that this is all very compelling play stuff it's that it works to begin with we often praise your games for feeling like a cohesive whole a pardon the analogy organism where everything is connected that's very much an established trope of the genre its greatest appeal now imagine one of the most convoluted examples of this genre that does that but the other trends but then also maintains thematically cygnus not just through its mechanisms but through how the game makes you feel if we are building Mars then I imagine our in-game personas motivation is to be remembered for building Mars and thus we score opportunity points at no time is this game cooperative but we exist in a closed environment where actions have direct causality and we're constantly forced to cooperate great this is a fantastic example of lizards work and maybe you're ready to take the plunge and dive into this snarl of symbiosis should you buy it oh forget for a second that this game costs over a hundred pounds and takes over an hour to teach and if you're the one learning it maybe set a day aside for it this flow and bounce will only emerge if everyone involved has played this game at least once and if this is your first time playing it's very likely that this game will make you angry let's combine everything that we've learnt together you win by scoring points you score points by building buildings you can build buildings once you've met a bunch of conditions and you use tech to power various actions except we omitted to mention that to build larger complexes you also have to have tech that matches that building type and there's like six different ones what happens then is that you'll have a building that no one has the technology for and no one wants to pick up because it's all the way over in orbit and you have got other things to do like build buildings except you don't want to build buildings because the colony level isn't advancing and you're not scoring points because no one's built that one building but no one has the technology for basically stalemate but a stalemate that will be avoided with experienced players because why wouldn't you pick up that technology in advance that people will want to use but having that much insight is the equivalent of mr. lizard asking you to run when you've only just learnt to put on your own diaper so that's a recommendation get yourself a copy of on Mars if you have a tremendous amount of patience if you put in the work and also have friends who'll indulge this you will eventually be with a puzzle that continues to offer death because of randomly distributed scoring conditions and a shifting focus between games because of different missions that reward you with crystals and together with a colony level work as an endgame trigger if you don't mind spending a hundred pounds of money and a hundred pounds of effort this box will probably surprise you with how much new it will offer with each repeat play and now we can actually finally fade to black one last thing for the love of board games do not use this video to learn how to actually play the game if you want to learn the rules then maybe watch an actual professional do it here's a link to the video somewhere flying around over here and if you would like this you can donate somewhere over here it's not fading to black there's something wrong if you press them Oh

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 73,206

Rating: 4.9012132 out of 5

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, on mars, vital lacerda, heavy euro, eagle gryphon, 2020

Id: y97TdIpy88w

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vz-Rei]

Accurate representation + fun video.

Once a group knows how to play, surprisingly, it plays in under 2 hours for something this ridiculously complex. It also does have very good cohesion between theme and mechanics.

[u/Xonim]

The part towards the beginning of the video where he’s talking about actions requiring a worker except maybe not and sometimes more workers except maybe not and moving workers to the break room except maybe not … Those types of things are exactly the reason I ended up getting rid of the game. There’s just too much of that for this time of my life. Three or four years ago I would’ve loved it, but now with two kids I don’t have the time or mental fortitude to deal with it.

[u/Arigomi]

I know someone that owns the game but is too intimidated to even open the box and organize everything. Instead, he just plays the copies other people own.

[u/DarQraven]

It's sad that all this ado about complexity overshadows any discussion about the game's more interesting aspects.

Yes, it's a heavy game. If you like those, you may like this. If you don't, you probably won't enjoy this. This thread reads like a bunch of people who don't really like strong liquor discussing how the vodka was too strong. Which is fair, but still rather redundant.

What I have found is that OM does rather interesting things that few other (similarly heavy) games do. The scoring mechanism for LSS is novel and creates game-long tension. Unlockable exec actions create nice long-term choices. Some aspects of the game even lean into semi-coop territory without explicitly going there (closed economy, tech sharing and dependency, colony levels, and scientists).

To me it feels almost like a sandbox game with heavy euro flavoring. I've seen players do radically different playstyles and end up 3 points apart at end-game.

[u/R0cketsauce]

One mechanic that I found really notched up the complexity is Executive Actions. In Lacerda's other games with Exec Actions, they tend to be a rare add on that can be timed out to gain the equivalent of extra turns used to set up a big turn down the road. The same is technically true with On Mars, but after a few rounds, I found that ever single turn you were performing an Exec Action and you had a ton to choose from. This has the effect of dramatically increasing your decision space each round because you need to consider pairs of actions together instead of just the single best option available to you.

Honestly, I didn't like it. It made it really hard to read the boardstate and have any ability to predict what your opponents might do. By the middle of the game there are SOOO many actions and bonus actions available that it kinda feels like a free-for-all. I'm sure with 10 games under your belt, this feeling recedes, but it really can be overwhelming and cause people to play pretty sub optimally just to get their turn over and move on.

[u/L0r3n20_1986]

I bought it a month ago and I played it several times with my wife and a friend. It is complex indeed. Note that complex doesn't mean difficult, it means you can do a lot of things and you have to keep in mind a lot of things. Up to now, my wife and I, found that each player has to "help" the others in keeping track of every consequences an action has. Nevertheless I'm loving this game (it's my first Lacerda but I'm a space-themed-game fan). For everyone saying it's too complex for them I have only an advice: take your time, watch a tutorial (Gaming Rules for example) and try it. You won't be disappointed! ;)

[u/Pjoernrachzarck]

I found On Mars to be quite easy to teach. It does absolutely not, in no way, compare to the opaqueness of Lisboa.

Everyone I’ve played it with has been able to get along just fine after 20min of overhead and 30min of guided turns.

Something I can’t say about games that are much leas complex, such as Root, Scythe or Pax. Even Escape Plan, Lacerda’s simplest, takes longer.

On Mars is the easiest Lacerda game to teach.

[u/Boardgaminglurker]

This is the type of game my real lifestyle can't support. I've enjoyed several Lacerda games in the past but this and Lisboa are a bridge too far...

[u/doktortimo]

I went into this game totally blind at a con over the weekend. I had never played a Lacerda game before and didn't know what I was getting into other than a heavy game that would take a while. Six hours later, I and a second player had to call it quits. If anybody in your group has moderate AP, expect this to take way longer than it says on the box for the first play. I can see how this could be a fun, thinky game that still moves fairly quickly once players are familiar, but my first experience was pretty miserable.