Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition | Solo Playthrough | With Colin

hello everyone and welcome to the one-stop co-op shop this is colin and today i have a treat for you we're going to do a solo play-through of terraforming mars aries expedition now i have had and played terraforming mars the base game a bunch actually i played it a bunch solo but i never actually showcased it because i didn't love it solo and i can't tell you exactly why but i love aries expedition solo so much better i actually really enjoy it co-op mike was not as keen about it co-op but uh my wife and i have loved playing and i've played it now three four times co-op two times solo and i've actually really enjoyed co-op however mike already did a co-op play through uh when this was on kickstarter so i'm gonna be showing you the solo variant also don't forget make sure to turn on your klingon subtitles if they are available because that means i missed something when editing and someone told me i have something i did wrong i will put it up so you can see it with the klingon subtitles with all of that out of the way let's go ahead and start setting up for our solo playthrough so in this game our goal is we need to get our heat all the way up to eight degrees celsius our oxygen all the way up to 14 and all of our nine ocean tiles here three six nine yep flipped over we need to have nine oceans on mars itself we have to do this within a certain amount of rounds for the solo game so i'm going to be the blue player the red player will be the solo ai tracker and what will happen is every five turns this is going to move forward one space after it moves here to the fifth space i'll have five more turns and when that fifth turn is complete if i have completed all of those three objectives we win the game for the solo game and then we count up our score and we can compare that to our previous plays however if we haven't completed any of these three tracks we lose the game now there are three levels of difficulty for this game since i've only played it a couple times solo we're gonna do it on novice and i'll show you how that is different as we play do note though that just like the competitive game you will start with five tr that's your terraforming rating and that's important because that is your victory points for the game but it also helps determine how much money you earn or mega credits mc's you will earn each time you develop here we have our player board so on the left hand side here these four different tracks here that determines our production of those certain items you start at zero for everything so we have zero mega credits production during the production phase we draw zero cards we have zero heat and zero plants down here we have our steel and titanium uh the more of this that we have the cheaper certain cards will be dependent upon what tags are on them and then in this area this will be where we actually notate the amount of these items that we have so if let's say i had this gold piece here that means i have 10 mega credits available to me during the production round i'd earn a zero plus whatever my tr is which is five so i'd earn five mega credits and i would place five mega credits here after setting up our player board what we're going to do is determine which corporation we're going to play what we get to do is look at the top two of these uh corporation cards and decide which one we want to play up here you can see a tag that could be important while you're playing there might be something that references that tag this is an earth tag this is the my knee productions uh you would start with 48 mega credits at the start of the game play a card from your hand that costs 12 mc or less without paying for its cost the requirement of this card must be fulfilled you start with 48 mega credits and then in effect for the game we have when you play a green card draw a card then discard a card oh that's kind of cool our other option will be arclight okay this one we have a plant tag and an animal tag you start with 43 credits this is worth one vp so this is another way you can earn victory points in this game if you're playing competitively that can really be important and when you're playing solo it can help with your score uh so if ever you see a circle like this with a number in it that tells you how many victory points that card is worth so you start with 43 mega credits this is worth one vp per two animals on this card and we have an effect when you play an animal or a plant including these add an additional to this card now you can just play where you choose one of these and you're set to go but i like to do the uh advanced variant where you get to draw eight cards and then you can discard as many of those as you want and redraw up before deciding on which one you want to be i've drawn the top eight cards of the project deck and now i have to decide which ones i want to keep and which ones i maybe want to ditch and draw up so this one is totally awesome because it would help with steel and titanium so i'm definitely going to keep that one i kind of like this one especially if i go for earth tags and jupiter tags uh this one has way too much stuff going on i think i discard this one i'm going to keep that one with the earth tag this one you need to have oxygen at a specific level uh yeah and it's only nah i'm going to discard that one the caretaker contract the uh you can see here the temperature has to be yellow or white in order to play this card so i think i'm going to discard that one this one it costs 14. you can see it has this tag here for steel if we're able to get steel generation uh we could actually make this cheaper so i might keep this one and i think i might keep this one as well because we can as an action just spend one mega credit to draw a card and cards are super helpful so with that i will discard these three cards and i will draw three new ones from the top of our project deck yeah our project deck has 206 cards and i will tell you i have everything sleeved and so what i've done is i've de-sleeved like a hundred cards hopefully that'll be enough for our play through but yeah so now this is my starting hand and now based on this i get to decide which one of the corporations i want to play as without a doubt it's going to be this my knee productions i think that looks awesome especially for being able to play a card at the beginning of the game that costs 12 or less for free i think i'm going to start off with this strip mine it costs 12 mega credits i get to play it for free so awesome now i do still have to have the requirement met and our requirement here says we have to lose one tr so i'm actually losing a victory point to play this card but i think it's worth it this means we'll go from five down to four tr and what's really nice is the card actually states that right on the card itself whenever there's a check mark that tells you that there's a requirement in order for you to play this card it requires you to spend one tr then the benefit of this card and you can see it'll benefit benefit us during phases one and two and you'll see what that means in a bit it says when you play a card with a steel tag you pay for less for it or when you play a card with a titanium tag you pay at three less for it which is super nice what we can do then is bump up both of these tracks two for this one and one here and you can actually see the benefits are also written on your player board itself to remind yourself of that so just for an example if i wanted to play this card now normally it would cost 13 but i have to steal production so i can reduce that cost by four to make it only nine now i do want to mention we have an effect here also when you play a green card we can draw a card and then discard a card so i'll go ahead and draw a card and we have the restructured resources this has an effect that states when you play a card you may spend one plant to reduce the cards cost by five mega credits oh that is kind of cool now i can discard any card in my hand so now it's just the decision of what do i want to discard and already it's gonna be hard to decide and there's so many great cards now i've got two cards right here that synergize really well together with the earth tags this one states that whenever you play a card that has a jupiter or an earth tag excluding this one you pay three less money for it and you draw a card and this one we can actually generate money per earth tag so i want to go for earth text which means i want to keep this card this card and this card for sure this one's going to give us more money and money is super important in this game because that's how you play almost all of your cards it's also a way that if you don't get the right cards you can spend money to push up that oxygen or the heat something like that so money generation especially in the solo game very important so these also let us draw cards which is super helpful because of course cards in your hand means you have more actions you also with these cards you can discard one for three money at any time so it's basically like getting us three mega credits per card so what i think i am going to do is discard the one that i drew it doesn't seem to fit anything that i have here i'm not really going for plants right now so i'm just gonna discard it the last part of our player setup is to look here we have a total of 48 mega credits that's what we're going to start with you can see here i have 10 20 30 45 46 47 48 i have not changed my production here because that tells me how much money i produce during the production phase so i'm set to go there the final thing you'll want to do is you'll want to grab your phase card so i'm the blue player i have the five blue phase cards there are five phases in the game each turn or each round what we're going to do is pick one of these to lead you'll see how it works but you have a main effect and then if you lead the card you get a bonus effect so i have my five phase cards and then the ai is going to have their five phase cards the difference with the dummy player is they're not going to be doing anything with their phase cards they're just going to flip them over and then we get to use the top ability we don't get the bottom but we get to use that top ability that means that when i'm leading a phase i want to try and pick a different phase so for an example if i had led produce i could gain the ability of produce plus the bonus and get this benefit if i had played the action card let's say i don't get to do actions twice i just get to do the actions with that one bonus action from the bonus effect here and that's it so what you get to do is after a couple of these have been flipped you know which faces are left in this deck and you'll want to make sure that you can utilize them so for an example they've flipped over these two we know they haven't flipped over production that means that i probably don't want to lead production i want to lead something else hoping that they'll flip production i was in production but hoping that they flip something that then i can use if i can't use it well then i'm just wasting those actions that i could be taking so all we need to do for them is shuffle this up and then like i mentioned after this deck empties we will reshuffle it back up and then we'll move that red marker one space up on the tr track when it gets to the fifth space that final five rounds we actually get to choose the order of these cards and then at the end of that we need to have both tracks to be completed and all of the ocean tiles flipped over and i just want you to see these are all the project cards here's the ones that i've de-sleeved so far so i'll use those and then if i run out and i need more cards i'll de-sleeve more as we go this is how much i like you guys i de-sleeve them just for this play-through and i'm going to sleeve them again because i love this game and yeah the sleeves are so nice well i always feel like the best way to teach is to play so let's go ahead and start so the first thing you need to do on your turn is you want to choose which one of these five different phases you want to lead what's important to note is that any phase that you don't lead and that the dummy player doesn't flip you're not going to do for that turn so if i really want to do research i can't count on it happening unless either i play it or the dummy player happens to play it also remember each one of these has a basic effect on top and then a bonus if you lead that card and some cards that you have these project cards will have benefits too if you lead a specific type of phase so with all that in mind let's pick out which one we want to play green cards that are in your hand like these three can be played in the development phase blue and red cards i don't have any red cards they're events but blue and red cards can be played in the construction phase actions actions are what you have on a lot of your cards and there's also standard actions that are on your board those can be activated during this phase production is when you produce to create more money maybe you've increased your heat production all of that that's what you can do here and research lets you draw cards so with that in mind i think i'm gonna do a development first since i've chosen development i know i'm gonna be able to play at one green card but since i'm leading it i get the benefit of three mega credits less for the card that you play during this phase so i have these three cards all of which i can play i'm thinking of starting with this commercial district now first of all this gives us two victory points for the end of the game doesn't really matter with uh the solo variant but that will help our score if we win what this card is going to do though is during the production phase this produces four mega credits so i'm going to be able to increase my mega credit production which currently is at zero to four i find that that's super helpful right at the beginning of the game now normally this costs 25 but i have a three cost reduction because of this so that puts it down to 22 but there's also a steel tag on here and i have two steel each steel gives us a minus two to its cost that's a total uh subtraction of minus four minus four plus minus three is minus seven i'm paying seven less to play this card that means i only have to pay 18 mega credits for it that's part of the reason why i've decided to lead this card now i'm leading this one let's see what the dummy player is going to lead we'll flip over their top card and they're going to play construction each player may play one blue card or one red card now if i had played this i could gain this benefit of drawing a card or playing an additional one during this phase but since i did not leave this i only get to be i'm only able to do this one now you can see this is phase two and on this car we have phase one that tells us which order we're going to do this so first we're going to do the green development phase then we're going to do the construction phase let's go ahead and pay that 18 mega credits for our commercial district 10 15 16 17 18. nice i had exactly that now i get to increase my mega credit production by four don't forget we have the ability from our corporation that when we play a green card we can draw one card so we're going to draw the food factory okay this one requires you to spend two plants but during the production phase you can produce four mega credits oh my gosh it only costs nine and we have steel reduction of cost i love that i just need to have two plants which i don't have any but i definitely think i'm going to keep this one so i have to discard one card it's going to be the question of which one do i want to discard i think i'm going to discard matter manufacturing it looks good but it doesn't have the earth tag and it doesn't have steel or titanium to make it cheaper and i have to only when i'm doing an action phase i will spend one mega credit to draw a card yeah i'm just gonna so i'm just gonna discard it we've now completed phase one let's move to phase two the construction phase after this we're already done with round one and we only have 25 rounds oh it's going to go fast we can choose between any three of these i'm thinking i this one just seems too good to pass up on it only costs six mega credits i has the earth tag and now we have an effect that when you play an earth tag or a jupiter tag card excluding this you pay three less mega credits and you get to draw a card see i'm definitely gonna do that i've got 10 here i'll get change for four and we'll place this one out on the board and then my friends is the end of round one real quick so now what we get to do for round two is we get to choose between the remaining phase cards in our hand you can never lead the same phase twice so we have to choose a different phase to lead then we'll get development back into our hands so we could do development the next time but we get to choose which one of these we'd like to lead i think i'm going to lead construction this time so i could potentially play it two blue cards in my hand or heck just play one and draw a card our dummy player will then lead research okay so that means all players will draw two cards and keep one so we will first do construction because it's phase two then we'll do phase five research let's start off with our matter generator here it's going to cost us 13 but there is that steel tag so we get minus four cost so it's only going to cost us nine to play this it also has an energy tank but that's not going to do anything unless we have something that references it we have a one time effect you see that lightning bolt that means it happens only when we play this card we get to draw two cards and then during the action phase we can discard a card from our hand to gain six mega credits so let's quickly draw two cards since we're here we have solar power that's going to give us more heat production which i don't have any of those and our first red card you may play an additional blue or red card this phase you pay 11 mega credits less for the next card you play this phase oh that's cool work cruise and i've got to say the art and the names of these cards are awesome both of those will go into my hand i do want to mention that your hand limit is 10 but it's only checked at the end of each turn and if you have too many you just discard down to 10 and you gain the 3 mega credits per card you discard for that so let's go ahead and pay for this we had to pay at 9 mega credits for that so i will replace that 10 with a 1. i don't have a ton of money so i'd like to play another red and by red i mean blue i've got this blue here that i was really looking to play but that cost me 10 essentially which would then give me a total of one two three give me five bucks left you know what maybe i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna play it right now and there's nothing like doing it in the present so it cost me 10 bucks to do this because 14 but there's the steel tag and i've got that minus two times two because i have two steals so minus four cost and now as an action when we do our action phase we can do this to draw a card we've now completed construction let's do research all players draw two cards and keep one so we have fusion power okay in order to play this card you have to have two tags already out that have energy i have one i don't have another this one it says during the production phase draw a card oh that's kind of nice and that's actually going to be really cheap for me but i need to get another energy card out first or we have the ma hole area this gives us for production of heat and it just costs 18. you can see though how incredibly helpful it is that i have steel because giving me that steel is reducing the cost of all these cards and as much as i like this one i don't have another energy tag do i have any that i'm gonna play oh i do have this one that i just drew nah nah i'm gonna discard this one i mean it's cool but i think i like this one better so i'm gonna put this one into my hand remember if i had led this i'd get to draw a total of five cards and keep two out of the five but since i didn't i only did this draw two and keep one okay i'd have to discard down to ten i definitely have less than ten so we'll just move to the next turn as you can see so far i've been doing lots of fun engine building things but have i even touched the mars board no we'll find out if that's a problem uh okay so i have these four phases i can choose from i did construction last time so i cannot choose that one i'm thinking because i have a total of one two three four five mega credits it's production time so i'm gonna play this since i'm leading it i'll gain the bonus of four mega credits with us leading up production there is a chance one of these three could be a production for the ai or dummy player here uh okay good it's not oh it's an action so because action's number three though we're going to do it first if let's say we had lead action we'd get the bonus that you can activate one action in additional time but no matter what each player activates any action effects and standard actions so action effects are those cards that we've been playing so this card that has an action i'll be able to do that because i have those out on the board let's though talk quick about standard actions remember how i said money is the name of the game well look down here we can do these standard actions during the action phase and we can do them as many times as we want we can spend 20 mega credits to buy a forest vp when you buy a force vp that's going to help the oxygen on mars and that would increase the oxygen level by one you can spend 14 money to increase heat by one you can these two are if you actually have them in your little areas here which of course i don't have any i'm not producing any of this yet if i have eight total plants or eight heat i can convert that into a forest tile and oxygen or into heat and then i can also spend 15 bucks just to flip one of those ocean tiles and that would gain me whatever the benefit is on the other side of the ocean tile as well as any of these things that affect any of the tracks that are on the mars board will also give you one tr it's going to increase your victory points and it's also going to help with your production so all good stuff but i can't do any of that i have five bucks so i don't have enough to do any of these i could sell some of my cards but i like all of my cards in my hand so i don't think i'm gonna do that instead let's just move to the actions that we have on our cards remember i can do every action on any of my cards once each and if i had led the action i could then choose one of those actions to do a second time so this action lets us draw a card so we have whoa what is that interplanetary relations one vp per four cards you've played when you draw cards during the research phase draw one additional card and keep one additional card wow i've never seen that one uh 35 bucks though hmm yeah you know what i am then going to activate this one i'm gonna discard this because i don't think i'm gonna play that and i'm gonna gain six bucks i need money money money money so i will gain six bucks for that we've completed our actions now let's move to production each player gains heat plants and draws cards according to their production they also gain a mega credits credits equal to their production plus their terraforming rating yeah my tr rating is still what was that calling four it's not even at what i started at i'm at four now i did lead this so i get the bonus of additional four mega credits four plus four is eight plus another four here is 12. so we will gain 12 mega credits much needed but not a ton now if i had any heat or if i had any plant production i would also do those but i don't have any of that so that is the end of this round i have still less than 10 cards heck all i have are development cards so i think it's pretty self-explanatory what i'm going to plant next i'm going to play always let me let me think about this for a second here are the three cards that the dummy player has played that means that we have development and we have production that are the last two for the dummy player so i was thinking of course i should play development but likely the dummy player is going to play development so i think maybe i'm going to play something else and what i think i'm going to lead is research that way i can draw five more cards keeping two out of the five and hopefully getting some blue or more red cards come on dummy player flip that green no we're going to flip production well we know they're going to lead green next time but we won't get the plus 4 here but we are going to gain some more bucks and actually that is the first one to go so we are going to just generate our mcs again for us our production is four here plus the four from the tr that's eight so i'll get a 10 and take two back and then we can do our research we get to draw five cards this time so we have underseas vent during the production phase you draw a card and this produces four heat oh my gosh that costs 31. our next one we have the deep well heating raised the temperature one step during the production phase this produces one heat i like that one but more green green green oh here we go the diamonds down raise the temperature three steps gain seven mega credits yeah i'm definitely keeping that one uh one two three and two more we have the regolith eaters this one we can only play when the temperature is at red yellow or white well currently it's at purple uh so actually i'm not going to read this we're just going to discard it because i'm not going to keep that one and our final one that we can look at geothermal power during the production phase this produces two heat yeah that's a discard this one i think with the remaining three that we have here i'm going to discard the deep well heating i'm going big a 31 and a 30 cost card well we know what the dummy player is going to lead it's going to be a development so let's play it construction that means when we flip this over we'll do development first followed by production we don't get the three cost discount but we can play a green and up to two reds or blues the development we're going to play is the miranda resort it costs us 15 normally but it has the earth tag we have that card that reduces earth tags by three so this is going to cost us 12. so 10 plus 2 mega credits that's a total of 12. the benefit though is it's going to gain us during the production phase this produces one mega credit per earth tag you have including this one if we look here we have one two three more earth tags so that's three more mega credit production we'll go from four up to seven also because we played a green card we get to draw a card and then discard a card so we have iron works we can spend four heat to increase the oxygen by one step wow that is way too good to pass up on i think with that we will discard solar solar power and then don't forget we also get to just draw a card because of this card here so we will draw the arctic algae that one requires temperature to be a red yellow or white and we can let's says requires okay effect when you flip an ocean tile gain four plants well we're then gonna have some fun we're gonna play our construction card here we're going to play a work cruise so that's gonna cost us five money that take by the way is the event take all red cards have that symbol on it we're going to spend 5 mega credits you may play an additional blue or red card this phase the next card that you play is cost 11 mega credits less so then we're going to play the dimus down so normally that costs 30. we have one titanium production so that's at 27. we then reduce it by 11 so that would be 16. we have 10 11 12 13 14 and then i'm going to discard this arctic algae for three more credits and with those three i need to use one i believe let me just make sure i've got this right nope i believe i have to spend 16 total credit total credits to be able to play this card that puts me down to one mega credit left i think we know what i'm going to be playing next uh production anyone but with that one mega credit left we can raise the temperature three steps oh and gain seven mega credits so that means we have a total of eight mega credits that are left for us we'll raise the temperature one two three steps and then we'll also move our victory points or tr up by three so that means when we produce we'll make even more money that was good now because i lead construction i can either draw a card or play another one i'm just going to draw a card we have the adopted lichen i also want to mention that even though these events have no other effect after you've played them you still put them out in your tableau because the tags can be referenced and there are times when you can maybe pick up those ones and play them again or something like that so you always want to make sure to play every card into your tableau our dummy player has now completed five phases so what we do is we move this up by one step and because we're playing on the novice level i can choose either heat or oxygen and move it up two spaces one two normally whenever you move those up you gain tr but when i'm doing that for the end of the round that's just helping me complete my objectives i don't gain victory points for those ones okay so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to shuffle these back up and we'll start our next set of five phases looking at the insane amount of money that we have hot not only eight let's go ahead and lead a production for this round trying to get us some more money the biggest thing is i don't have a heat or plant production i really need to work on that i'm kind of hoping for action here because i could draw a card and potentially discard one for money no it's a development do i have enough money to play a development well you know this import of advanced ghg it costs eight money that's how much i have but we have an earth tag so that actually only cost us five money minus three because of the card we played what is that card called interplanetary conference thanks to the conference it's going to cost us only five that's going to increase our heat production and don't forget this is a green card so we get to draw one card here i'm going to put this out we can draw one card and we can discard any card oh my gosh surface mines that's going to make more of the titanium and more steel oh we have to discard a card what if i don't want to discard any of these cards oh yeah let's let's discard this one uh and then we get to just draw a card because we played a card with an earth tag so we have the giant asteroid this thing cost 36 raise the temperature two steps and flip two ocean tiles that's awesome and hey look at this we're on the heat board we're up to two heat production which speaking of heat production i think it's just time to produce so first thing before i forget we'll generate the extra four since we led them then we're going to gain seven mega credits plus seven tr so that's a total of 14 bucks i like that actually i'm pretty sure it's 15 i think i forgot to adjust my mega credit production because i played another earth tag card i have one two three four so that's four from here plus another four is from here which is eight yeah so we have eight total mega production credits plus the seven that's 15 more plus the five six seven that we have there i like it we also get to generate a whopping two heat yay oh we're on the board still no plants well we don't like plants apparently with having just received surface mines that looks way too good to not play so we're going to lead development let's see what the uh dummy player is going to lead the nice thing is is we know it's not a development it will be a construction okay so we can play one red or blue card one green card and we'll do the green card first we'll play that surface mines card it normally costs 13 but we have to steal so we'll subtract four from that that's nine plus the three from this that's eight seven six so we only have to pay at six bucks for this and it's going to increase our uh not production but the value of steel and titanium that we have by one each that means we have three steel and two titanium we just played a green card so we get to draw a card and we have the toll station you may play a green card from your hand that costs a printed cost of nine or less without paying its cost during the production phase this produces 3mcs we have to discard a card yeah you know i'm just going to discard this one it looks cool but it's not great so my goal is to actually get my heat production up if that ever happens and if it does this ironworks card is going to be amazing because i can generate heat and actually turn it into oxygen normally heat only turns into increasing the temperature this would allow us to actually increase the oxygen which is awesome so this normally costs 12 but we now have three steal each one at a two cost discounts that's six less to play this card so we'll only have to pay at six bucks leaving us with 10 mega credits left and now we have this as an action with the options that we have left there is a chance that the dummy player is going to play the action card next but if i lead this i can do one action twice and one of the actions that i can do is draw a card so i can actually draw two cards it's almost as good as this research just to draw two cards and keep one so i think i'm just going to play the action card take the chance that they're not going to play the action card for the dummy player let's see what they're going to lead they're going to lead production actually that's great with that let's start our actions the first action we're going to do is just simply draw a card we have a wood burning stove we could gain four plants with that oh that's kind of appealing let's do one action twice let's do that one twice let's draw two cards oh we have the phobos falls i love all these event cards but look at how expensive they are okay now we can discard a card for six bucks i don't love it but i think i'm gonna discard this wood burning stove i'm not going for plants anyways oh that's terrible i don't want to save the environment uh i'm gonna get six bucks for that so i have a total of 16 mega credits here i could then spend four heat to draw to increase the oxygen but i don't think i can't do that i only have two heat so i can't do that action since we're moving into production i do think i'm going to do one standard action i'm going to spend 15 of our mega credits here to flip over one ocean tile that will also increase our tr by one we'll push this up by one and let's just flip this one you can choose any one of them uh this one will give us two plants you can't do much with two plants but hey it's better than zero plants right we'll then simply move to production our tr is five six seven eight eight plus eight here is sixteen so we'll gain 16 bucks we don't get the additional four because we didn't lead it we don't draw any cards we do generate two whopping heat which means we can actually increase the oxygen with that next time no plants and i think we're good to go for this round i think i'd like to play a card in my hand for free so let's do that we'll do a development phase we know the dummy player has already done a development phase that's why i felt comfortable doing that okay we've got a research so we will first do development then do research drawing two and keeping one our green card that's going to cost zero because of the steel here we have three steel three times two is six and we get the minus three costs from this which is nine that means we can play this food factory for free we do have to spend the two plants that we got though that's why i was holding on to this i was so happy when i had those plants because that's what it requires we're gonna increase our money production by four once you go up to ten you go one two three four so we're at 12 you take one of your extra markers and you mark the 10 spot here so now i'll generate 12 plus whatever my tr is for mcs we then get to draw two cards and keep one of them so we have smeltine oh that's gonna gain us five heat and we would draw two cards and we play it oh man and this one mars university uh this looks crazy it's got stuff about plants and so we're going to discard that this looks awesome i'm going for way too expensive cards but i love it if you look at the hand that we have look at the cost of these cards yeah so i think what i'm going to lead i know that this is the action card for them i'm going to lead production so first we'll do actions and then production our first action let's go ahead and just draw a card and we have the vesta shipyard oh it makes even cheaper for any titanium cards that's really appealing we have this one here where we can spend four heat remember we have four heat and we can bump up oxygen by one which will increase our tr by one yay for slowly getting into red and nine tr we then from this card can discard a card and i'm gonna discard this vesta shipyard even though i like it for six more mega credits so that gives us a total of 10 20 1 2 3 we have 23 mega credits and then i think i'm going to hold on doing any of the standard actions this time we're then going to move to production we led production so we get the bonus four bucks so i'm going to do that now because it's easy to forget then let's see about our generation we have 10 11 12 12 plus the 9 tr that is 21. yeah we're starting to make some money uh and then you know how much heat too yeah that's going to be a problem i really need to increase our heat but i've got some ways to finally do that we've now completed 10 turns of the game so we're going to move this up by one i can choose one of these two tracks to move up by two i'm gonna do the temperature because we look like we're the farthest away let's shuffle these up like so and now we're ready for the next phase i've got a red green hand here i'm thinking going green we're going to start with development let's see don't oh yes it's production okay so we'll be able to produce after we develop because of that production flip i think we're going to play the undersea events don't ask how we're making them especially with steel uh but so we have steel reduction of six plus the reduction here of nine so this is going to cost us nine less so instead of being 31 it's going to be 22. so we're gonna spend 20 here and two here that's going to increase our card production during the production phase to one and our heat by four being able to draw cards during the production phase is pretty sweet if you ask me and four plus two we move up to six heat production now we'll then simply move into production we will gain 12 plus that nine so that's 21 bucks 20 plus one not the plus four because we didn't lead it we get to draw a card now and we have the tropical resort oh my gosh it gives us minus five to our tr but all could give us additional uh money oh you know who cares about our tr oh that's not tr that's heat and of course we'll generate that six heat i'm not one to sit on all of that dough let's play one of our awesome event cards like maybe that giant ice asteroid or the um phobos false we can do that with this construction card the dummy player will respond by playing a development so we can actually play a green card first and i might just have just the one to play this ma whole area costs us 18 minus 6 so that's 12. we have 10 here and 2 here it's going to increase our heat production by 4. now we're talking baby going from six to ten i feel like things are turning tides next during that construction step we're gonna play the giant ice asteroid we have titanium of two so we get to subtract the cost of six to that 36 cost so it's only going to cost us 30. oh that was easy but that means we're going to raise the temperature by two steps and flip two ocean tiles that means we'll go up one two three at four on our tr track tracks we're at 13 we'll move this up by two and let's flip two more of these we'll gain one plant one plant and one card and let's see we get research and then our second one we'll do this one and that will give us one plant and one buck then let's go ahead and spend five bucks to play a research we can do that because we led construction and we ended up drawing this card which we can play now it costs us five bucks we can simply draw two cards and our two cards will be solar trappings that can help with heat and drawing a card and we have the methane from titan that can help with plant production and heat production but we need to have oxygen in red which oh it's just in red red or higher we are good and we have it there well we have a whopping one dollar i think it's safe to say production sounds like a good idea we know the dummy player is not going to play production they already played it so we'll discard this we'll flip and we're going to do research so actually production is first first let's gain our bonus of 4 bucks then we have a total of 12 mega credits here plus the 13 from our tr that's 25. yes rolling in the dough we're also going to gain 10 heat and two no no not two zero i was thinking we were gaining some we're still gaining zero plants so that's it for production research is next i had to de-sleeve some more cards we have the artificial jungle spend one plan to draw a card i'm probably not going to do that and we have oh by the way i should have drawn a card so that's my card draw for the production step i missed that now i'm going to draw two and keep one for research so we either have the tropical stress power or the ice cap meltings i'm actually not in love with either one of these i think i'm just going to keep this one and discard this one for our next turn i really wanted to do construction but i'm worried that there's only two left here and construction is one of them so i think i'm gonna do a development and yeah good thing i did that construction is the other one so we'll develop first let's play solar trapping we do have our steel uh tag here so we reduce the cost of this by six it only costs four it actually only costs one so we'll exchange this five into four ones and we're good to go this is going to allow us to draw a card and gain three heat so we're going to draw the eagle ecological zone and we'll gain three heat we're also going to push up our heat production by one that means we're producing a whopping 11 heat we're then going to play a phobos falls here 10 25 26 it has the titanium tag so that means i can reduce its cost by six because i have two titanium we're going to be able to raise the temperature one step flip an ocean tile and draw two more lovely cards the two cards we're going to draw are the media group uh and oh man when you play an event you pay five less for it why didn't i have this the whole game and we have this one redrafted contracts discard up to three cards in hand to draw that many cards we'll raise that temperature one step pushing this up by one then we'll push it up by one more and flip another one of these tiles and we'll gain two more of those plants well i think we all know what that last card is going to be the action one so i need to do production because i have three bucks so we'll do activating one action and any standard actions and i should say one action per card and then we will generate tons of dough first thing we can do is draw a card from this so we have the kalisto panel mines during the production phase draw a card oh it's okay it's not great we can then discard a card for six bucks i'm gonna discard this redrafted contracts don't feel like it's wonderful six bucks plus the three that we have means that we're actually at nine which is nice we are then going to pay at four heat to push up oxygen by one that's from this card oxygen will go to four percent and we are now at 16 tr and now we've completed our regular actions we can now do our standard actions the standard actions that you have to do you don't have an option as long as i have enough heat which is eight or more i need to spend heat as many times as i can to push up the temperature i can't hold on to this while the temperature isn't completed so i actually have 15 16 total heat so i'm going to spend that 16 and that's going to allow me to push up the temperature two spots i think they do that simply so in the competitive game you don't have someone hoarding all of that heat and just generating more victory points and not ending the game because in the competitive game you keep playing until all of the three parameters are completed now let's produce so first we get our free at four bucks because we lead production then we'll gain 18 plus 12 so that's 30 bucks oh my gosh we have a total of 11 heat here and we get to draw a card i'm not gonna forget that so our card draw is the fueled generators and that should be it now i have i believe it's nine cards right here one two three four five six seven eight nine so i'm still okay card wise we're now going to advance to the fourth phase of this moving this one up by two steps because apparently i don't like any force i haven't generated any force at all we're going to shuffle these up and you know each game has been so incredibly different normally i go for plants but apparently i don't like plants in this game so we have 10 more rounds to be able to complete this one complete this one and reveal three four five more of these ocean tiles looking at my hand i have tons of developments so i think with the four of the phases i can choose let's go with development this time our dummy player will choose research so we'll draw two and keep one after doing our development what do you say we play smelting so it normally costs 28 minus three 27 26 25 minus another six so that's 19. so we need to pay a total of 19 for this i've got 20 bucks right here i'll gain a buck back and then we get to draw two cards so our two cards we have convoy from europa and asteroid mining oh my gosh that'd give us more titanium draw a car flipping ocean tile oh and we're going to increase our heat production by oh you know what five we'll move from 11 up to 16. we'll then draw two cards keeping one we have space heaters draw a card and increases our heat because i don't think we have enough heat oh and you know what we have our next card i'm going to de-sleeve it and i'm going to have to de-sleeve some more this one is the protected valley gain a force vp and raise oxygen i almost feel like i just need to do that cool and yeah i definitely think i'm going to keep that one i'll discard this one well i have one blue and one red card i'd really really like to play it so i'm going to do construction hoping beyond hope this is not construction no it's production awesome so we'll do construction and then production we're going to first play media group here it costs 11 normally but we get to reduce it by 3 because it has an earth tag and that's going to hit our production of mega credits by one it's going to increase it so that's going to cost us 8 to play this i've got 10 here i'll make change for 2. and now whenever we play an event card it costs 5 bucks less so the reason i wanted to do that is because now i can play this event card which normally costs 14 minus five so it's only nine minus six because of our titanium so it goes from down from nine down to three only cost us three bucks for that to draw a card and to flip an ocean tile so we'll grab standard technology as our card and let's flip an ocean tile before doing that though we'll increase our mega credits by one because of that earth tag don't ask why but i always love to do the ones in the center at the end okay we get a card draw and we'll increase this up to 19 and we'll draw cartel we're then going to produce and we are at 19 for our tr 19 plus 13 is 29 30 31 32 so 10 20 30 and two holy moly it's a lot of money we also have 10 oh my gosh 16 heat 10 and 5 and one and zero plants and of course we get to draw a card and we have the medical lab we have way too many cards in our hand i'm gonna discard all five of these three six nine twelve fifteen we're gonna gain 15 more mega credits i think because of that the next one i'm going to lead oh they haven't led action yet what have they led research and production what i don't really want to draw more cards i don't know what to lead i know i have a development card i'd like to play actually a couple of them so i'm gonna do that one and we're gonna hope that that's an action awesome i'm so i was gonna lead action awesome so we'll first develop and then we will do our actions this is where things get kind of crazy this cartel card is ridiculous we have a reduced cost of three from the bonus we also have the reduced cost of three because it has the earth tag so it costs nothing during the production phase this produces one mega credit per earth tag that you have including this one so we're going to gain a ton more mega credits which is awesome it's also an earth tagged card so we get to just draw a card so we'll have the again yeti at shipyard and then because of our corporation we get to draw one card and discard one card we have sponsors which also has an earth tag i think we'll discard this methane from titan 35 bucks for that doesn't seem worth it let's see how many earth tags we have one two three four five six and we had a long spot we didn't play any so six more we get to increase our mega credit uh production by six six plus 13 puts us up to 19. so we're now generating 19 bucks every time we produce and i might be missing something let's just double check this one two three four five six we have two of these that were generating money for that so that's 12 13 14 15 16. 17 18 19 20. so i maybe miss one somewhere but we're at 20 production uh yeah maybe uh hopefully i'll have it in a subtitle of where i missed that uh if i didn't i'll let you know uh or you'll let me know hopefully but yeah now i'm at 20 bucks every time i produce for mega credits on top of my tr now let's do our actions we'll definitely spend four heat here to push up our oxygen we will just draw a card for this this will give us wow during the production phase draw a card producing two heat and two plants i'm not sure if that's going to be worth it anymore we can discard a card to be able to generate six bucks i definitely want to do that i think i'm going to discard this artificial jungle and that will generate six more mega credits for us we'll push up oxygen by one putting ourselves up to 20 tr we'll then do some standard actions we have 10 20 1 2 3 4 we exactly have 24 heat we can increase the temperature actually we have to we don't have an option we have to increase the temperature three at times and use all of our heat i am totally okay with that one two three we're now at minus four one two three we're at 23 tr i then think i'm going to spend 30 bucks here so i can flip two ocean tiles that'll move us up to 25 tr we'll flip this one over generating four more tr nice i don't even know how much we have we'll look at it in a second and then we'll do this one and we'll gain one plant and 2 tr we still have 42 bucks and i think i could do more actions but i think i'm going to hold i want to play a couple more cards the big one that i want to play you guys look at this card it's a standard technology card you pay a 4mc less for the standard actions that cost mc so that's why i kind of want to play this and then do some more actions all of them are going to cost less money i think that will be awesome with that being said though one of the remaining two cards will be that construction so it seems silly for me to lead it i'll need production to get some more money this time and we'll flip oh they're gonna do development so we've got a development and then production let's play medical lab we have 15 total costs but with steel and we have three steel that's actually going to be only nine so i'm going to give up a 10 and get one back this will now generate one additional mega credit drain production for every two of the steel tags that we have including this card this is going to get ridiculous we're currently at 20 production that will be at 21 22 23 24 25 26 so we now produce 26 mega credits on top of our tr during the production step which is where we're going to move to now not to mention we'll generate the regular force i'll grab a 5 taking away a 1 from my mega credit area since we led production you can see here we have 25 tr plus we have the 26 here so that's 51 bucks one two three four five and one we also have a total of sixteen heat ten five and one and sixteen is amazing because i can push up our temperature by two during the action step we get one additional card and we have industrial microbes and we still have zero plants this actually worked out quite well for us because we're gonna play action we know they're gonna play construction that's going to allow us to play the standard technology during the construction step that will cost us a total of 15 but now all of our standard actions are gonna cost four bucks less right before we move into the action step and don't forget we get to do one action two times this turn the action we're going to play twice this turn will be at this one so we are going to spend eight heat to be able to push up oxygen two times we can then draw one card and we have a comet uh yeah we're definitely going to keep the comment we're then going to discard a card i think i think i'm going to discard this commercial imports too expensive we're not going to use it and we're going to generate six total mega credits for that we'll push that oxygen up to nine percent moving us to 27 total tr we then have exactly eight heat so we'll use those eight heat to push up the uh the heat or temperature to minus two pushing ourselves up to 28 tr we're going to spend 11 bucks here to be able to flip over one ocean tile that puts us up to 29 and of course we've got to do this one that will let us draw a card and we have the nuclear plants i love how it's minus one we're then finally going to get some forest vp now this costs us 20 normally but we have the minus 4 from the standard technology so it's 16. we're going to do that uh two times so that's 32 30 plus 2 for our mcs and you can see here when we get the force vp we also push up our oxygen by one so i'm gonna grab these two forest vps they just set aside by the side of our board and we'll count those up but we'll also move up our oxygen by two and rtr by 2. we'll move up to 31 on here and our oxygen is at 11 and you know what i think we're going to do that one more time we're going to gain a forest vp token here we're going to push this up spending 16 of our mega credits that means we have exactly 20 left and we're gonna push this up by one okay that's going to end our what is this fourth set of phases i'll flip or shuffle these up i'll go ahead and push this over here and actually i don't need to shuffle these up the final round we get to choose for the dummy player which one of these they will lead each turn it gives you a little more flexibility and it will help you to complete your objectives i am definitely gonna push this one up by two so i don't have to worry about oxygen all i'm looking for is heat and the ocean tile all right are you ready for this we are going to lead production we would like the dummy player to play construction the reason for that is we're just going to play it one card during the construction step that's this comet it normally costs us 25. we have our media group that reduces the cost of event cards by five so that goes down to 20. i have two titaniums reduce that by six that's going to go down to 14 to play that card i have 20 bucks here so i will get six bucks back we now can raise the temperature one step and flip our final ocean tile we'll bump this up to zero we'll flip this over and we gain one more uh card over the towing a comet and we'll get one more buck so we have a total of seven we'll move this up by two to thirty four let's move to production the first thing we'll do is convert this one to four that's our bonus production we're now gaining 34 44 54 plus six oh my gosh that's 60 bucks that's just kind of insane we now have 71 mega credits we also can draw a card here we have the community gardens then we generate 16 total heat 10 plus five plus one and our regular zero plants i'm then going to gain 21 more tr discarding all of these cards one two three four five six seven i don't think i'm going to play them 21 more bucks i will take that now we'll play the action card and we'll have the dummy player play research we can ignore this action over here because i don't need any more oxygen so we'll simply draw a card for this one ooh satellites that's gaining more money uh i think we'll do that one a second time let's see okay that will give us victory points so i'll keep that one in hand i'm then going to discard this satellite's card so i can generate six more tr then we're going to use our 16 heat that we have here to push up our temperature by two that'll push us up to plus four and 36 tr i think i'm gonna pay the rest of the way so each time i do that that's 10 bucks i need to do it two more times so i've got 20 bucks here we'll do one two one two and that means we have fully terraformed mars i could try and then eke out as many points as i could by playing these cards but i think i've made this play through long enough so to show you what you do when you're done now that i've completed my tr is what 38 then i look at all these cards that have victory points so this one's one so 39 40. let's see if there's any other ones 41 and sorry let's see if there's any more 42 4344 so then i scored a total of 44 victory points and yeah i have to say every time i've played this game it has been so incredibly different i have never had it where i've oh actually i even forgot three more victory points i had three more victory points from the forest tiles but i only had three force tiles i got oxygen all the way to here now granted because i was on novice and i was pushing that up by two that really sincerely helped that i definitely think we could have played probably on standard maybe probably not expert i don't think we would have been able to do on an expert but i think we could have done standard i had a pretty good engine of money going at the end there hopefully though this gives you a taste of just how much fun this game is it's hard for me to describe how much fun it is to find those combos play them yeah it's it's just a joy so hopefully you enjoyed this thanks so much for watching and i hope to see you in our next playthrough

Channel: One Stop Co-op Shop

Views: 25,634

Keywords: board, game, one stop, co-op shop, oscs, ares expedition, terraforming mars, solo, engine building, how to play, learn to play

Id: 2sxU6KPuIck

Length: 59min 58sec (3598 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021