Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition - Tutorial & Playthrough

welcome to the jungats games tutorial for terraforming mars aries expedition in this video i'll be teaching you the rules of the game as it's being played and i will be showing about half of a game today now i do want to point out that the only reason this video is being made is because it won the monthly poll that is voted on by the patreon supporters of the channel if you enjoy videos like this one and you'd like to see more of them in the future then i do hope that you would consider directly supporting the channel and you can learn more about that by going to patreon.com johngetsgames and then perhaps you can actually vote on these videos as well now the last thing i'd like to ask is that if you enjoy this video that you please click the like button for it down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel alright let's jump into the game out here we have the game fully set up and ready to play for our three different players now before i start i would like to ask that you please turn on the klingon subtitles because i might make mistakes as i'm showing you the game and those will let me put corrections on the screen where you should be able to see them and i will also put corrections below this video in the top comment i'd also like to mention that today i'm filming with the kickstarter version of the game which means some of the components like these player boards as well as some of the cards in this deck are not necessarily going to be the same as the retail release version of the game well let's start things off with a brief overview of the game now in it players are trying to collectively terraform the planet of mars and we are hoping to make the most victory points as we can as that happens now this board over here shows mars and we have an oxygen track that starts at zero percent and goes up to 14 we have a temperature track that starts at negative 30 degrees celsius and goes up to positive eight degrees celsius and we also have these nine desert tiles now as we play through the game we are going to increase the oxygen increase the temperature and we are going to add water to mars by flipping these desert tiles over to their ocean sides now part of the name of this game is terraforming mars and that is the ultimate goal we are going to keep playing the game until all of these are ocean tiles the oxygen track has maxed out and so has the temperature track along the way we are each going to gain victory points for helping to terraform the planet and we will also gain victory points for the fourths we have planted on the planet as well as many of the cards that we play now this really is a card game and each of the players starts the game with eight of these cards and as we play through the game we are going to be putting these in front of us and then activating some of them while others will increase the amount of stuff that we produce when production happens now the way we do all of these things involves using these action cards and action tiles each round everyone will simultaneously choose one of these cards they will place it face down and then we will all reveal and every one of the action types that was revealed by the players will be flipped over here on the row and once we do that each player will simultaneously perform all of these phases that are showing up on the tokens after all of that has happened we will once again simultaneously choose a new card but we cannot choose the card that is already on the table so we can put a new one out take the rest back flip this over and then continue on as we all get to take the actions that each one of us decides it's going to happen within each round of the game now that was a pretty high level overview and i will describe the details of how all of this works as we are playing the game and i think at this point it's time to go ahead and start for today's tutorial we are going to play as the blue player down over here and let's now jump into the first round of the game as i mentioned in the overview what everyone does now is grabs all of their action cards and then we select one of these and place it face down on the table now in order to figure out which of these action phases we want to happen we are going to have to look at our hand of cards at the beginning of the game all players got eight random cards from the deck and as you can see they come in three different colors now in the top left corner of each of these cards there is a mega credit cost and that is the amount of mega credits that we have to spend and i think for the rest of the video i'm just going to call mega credits money to simplify things that means if we wanted to play this card right here we would have to spend 13 money now on these cards we also have spots for tags and i'll describe the details of why those matter relatively soon at the bottom part of each card there are different areas with different colors and every single card also has text that tells you exactly what the restrictions of the card are and also tells you exactly what that card will do for us next up let's look back again at these action phase cards as you can see there is a development construction action production and research card and all players have this same set now at a high level the development action phase will let the players play one green card down into their tableau the construction card will let players play a blue or red card from their hand into their tableau the action card will let players activate actions that show up on their cards as well as standard actions that show up on our boards and production will allow us to gain money cards heat as well as plants from our production board the final card is research and this will let us draw cards and then keep one of them to try and find good cards that will work for the things that we are planning on doing now each of these cards has a text that also describes exactly what they do and we'll see how each of these works as we play i think for the very first round of the game i would like to play one of these green development cards so let's play the development action card and we can put it face down in front of us and now wait for our opponents to make their action card selections once we've all made our decision we can simultaneously reveal all of the selected action cards and then we can flip each phase token over that matches at least one of these phase cards that players put out in front of them as you can see two of us played the development card but if at least one of them was played we'd flip this over to show that development is going to happen and then one person played construction so that means this is going to flip over and the construction phase is also going to happen now everything we've done so far in the round has been called the planning step and that is now done which means we can move into the second step of the round where we resolve the phases now this happens in phase order starting with the lowest number and proceeding to the highest and all players will act simultaneously within each of these phases so that means everyone can perform a development phase so let's focus down over here now as you can see this card says each player may play one green project card which i've already discussed but every single one of these cards also has a bonus section down at the bottom now the bonus says we can pay three money less for the card that we play during this phase and the bonus effects only apply to the players who actually put that card down so the green card that we play will cost three money less but since we played this development card the yellow player also gets to play a green card from their hand but they will not get this bonus so they will have to pay full price unless they have some other discount in their area that being said later on in the round we will get to do a construction action but only the yellow player will gain the bonus printed at the bottom of that and i'll explain how that works very soon so let's now go ahead and play one of our green cards as you can see we have four of them and they have money costs of 10 13 15 and 25 respectively now with that in mind we can look at our board because this tracks not only how much stuff we make during production but it also tells us how much stuff we have at the moment now this yellow area over here represents our money and these tokens in this area are universal markers the gold markers represent 10 of whatever area that is in the silver markers represent five and the copper markers represent one so as you can see we have four of these ten markers and one five marker in our money area and that means we currently have 45 money to spend now we gained this money based off of our corporation card as you can see it has a 45 money icon in the top right and during setup we pulled two random cards and then decided between the two and thorgate is the one we decided to go with now as you can see there is a red area on our board that represents the heat that we have to spend and a green area that represents the plants that we have to spend and obviously at this point in the game we have zero heat and zero plants over here these tracks tell us how much stuff we make during production and i'll describe how production works later so with 45 money we can easily afford to play any of these four cards that we have in front of us and i think we want to play this giant space mirror as you can see that has a base cost of 13 money but remember as a bonus for selecting development we pay three money less so now we have to pay 10. now in addition to that we have another effect that we can apply and that is over here on our corporation card as you can see there are a couple of banners on this card and these tell us special things that we gain for being thorgate now in particular we can look down here and this purple area has a roman numeral one and a two which means this is going to apply during phases one and two which are development and construction now the purple background means this is an effect that will be triggered when a specific condition happens while playing in this case we can see over here that this effect says that whenever we play an energy tag we pay three less money for it now tags are the circular icons that show up in the left side of each card and as you can see each card can have at most three of these tags this giant space mirror has a space tag and an energy tag and unless otherwise stated these tags don't do anything but specific conditions will cause these tags to trigger certain effects as we are playing the game in this case you'll notice this giant space mirror does have this purple energy tag that matches up with that icon so that means that the giant space mirror is going to cost us three less money because it has that tag and as we play through the game every time we put a card down that has that tag on it we are going to pay three less money so we are obviously going to be keeping our eye out for that so once again this cost 13 as a base then we can subtract three for this bonus and three more for our corporation bonus and that means we are only going to spend seven money to play this giant space mirror now we can spend seven money by getting rid of a 10 and taking three more as a remainder and now this giant space mirror has been added into our tableau now at the bottom of this card you'll notice that there is a box with an orange background and then there is also some text now this text tells us exactly what the icons to the left mean for us and in this case it says during the production phase this is going to produce three heat now over here you'll notice on this box there is a little roman numeral four icon and the fourth phase is indeed production which is what this is telling us now the orange background means this is going to increase our production for different things and in this case it says three heat now with that in mind we can look over here to our tracks and specifically this is our heat production track as you can see our token is currently at the one spot and that is because thorgate also gave us a starting one heat production at the beginning of the game now by playing this giant space mirror we have increased our heat production by three so that means we will add three to one and our heat production is now all the way up to four now that is not actually going to do anything for us until we have a production phase and again i'll describe how that works later on in the tutorial this means we are done with our development phase but of course our opponents are also simultaneously playing each of them can play at most one green card and the yellow player is going to play nitrophilic moss that is going to cost them 14 money and they do not gain this bonus because they played a construction card not a development card in this round now as you can see the yellow player started with just 27 money so significantly less than us and when they pay for this they have to spend the 14 and then the effect down here says that during the production phase this card is going to produce them two plants as you can see the plant production track is down over here and the yellow player is already at the one spot because their corporation which is ecoline says at the start of the game they increase their plant production by one so they can add two more to that and that means they have a plant production of three up here red has also played a green card and this is the great escarpment consortium and it is pretty cheap it only costs three money to play now you'll notice red actually played a development card which means they get the bonus of spending three money less which means they pay three minus three or zero money to put this card into play now as you can see this card has a gray icon background whereas the other ones we've seen so far have had orange now orange increases the production of certain things and the gray background means this will give that player a capabilities increase now in this game there are two capabilities one is steel and the other one is titanium and this shows that steel icon which means that the red player can increase their steel up by one now they actually are at the one spot already because their mining guild corporation card added one for them during setup this means they can add one more and they now have it to steal and as you can see down here it says that whenever they play a building tag they pay two less money for it now this is describing the effect of steel when we are playing cards as you can see that shows the brown building tag and it says for every steal a player has they spend two less money for that card now again tags show up on the left side of cards so for example there is this medical lab that we have in our hand and this does have a building tag so if the red player was to play this card since it has a building tag they would pay two less money for each steal that they have so in this case that would lower the cost by four after the red player gained that steel we can now look up here to their corporation card which is called the mining guild and down here they have an effect that only activates during the first phase which is where we are at that says that each time they play steel production excluding this they gain one terraforming rating excluding this applies to the increase of steel that shows up on that card so that means every steel production they increase in the future will increase their terraforming rating by one and of course they did just do that each player's terraforming rating is tracked along the outside of this board and we all start at five this means red is going to gain another terraforming rating so they will go up to six and every single terraforming rating is one victory point at the end of the game so red effectively just gained one point and our terraforming rating will increase the amount of money we make during production and again i'll describe how that works later at this point we have all finished development so now we can all simultaneously perform a construction phase so let's focus on this construction card and now each player may play one blue card or one red card from their hand so let's focus down here and as you can see we have two blue cards and we have two red cards that we can choose from at the moment we have 38 money so we can easily afford to play any of these out of these options i think let's play optimal aerobraking this has an effect down here that happens during the first and second phases and it says that whenever we play a event tag we gain two heat and two plants now this downward arrow is the event tag and it shows up on all event cards and red cards are events so every red card will have one of these tags and considering we have two of these red cards i think playing this first to then gain benefits when we play those red cards is going to be in our best interest so let's play optimal aerobraking and that is going to cost us 10 money after paying for this we can then add this into our tableau now we are going to be playing a lot of cards throughout this game so it is best to overlap them splaying over to the right and i like to keep the colors of effects together where possible so we can put this purple effect next to that other purple effect and i imagine we'll put all of our orange production effects down into this part of our tableau as we continue to play once again all players are performing this construction phase simultaneously and the yellow player is the one who actually played this card now the bonus for playing construction says that in addition to playing a blue card or a red card they can draw a card or they can play an additional blue or red card during this phase so they could play a blue or a red and a draw a card or they could play two blue two red or a blue and a red that gives the yellow player quite a bit of flexibility and the first thing they want to play is going to be this research outpost now that has a cost of six and after they pay for that we can look down here and see this effect happens during the first and second phases which is development and construction and it says as an effect whenever they play a card they pay one less money for it so that is a universal discount they have on all future card plays that they have for the rest of the game so they've played one blue card and as a bonus they can draw a card or play another blue or red card and they've decided to play a red card once again all red cards are events and you can play these red cards down into any of the displays if you want and they're just going to put this one down over here now that has a cost of five but of course this research outpost lowers the amount they pay by one for every card so they only have to pay four for this and then when we look down here you'll notice there is this lightning bolt and it says draw two cards now events are always one-shot cards they do something for you and then for the rest of the game the only thing they will do is provide you with tags which could be beneficial for other cards that you continue to play i suppose it is worth noting that some event cards will increase or decrease the amount of victory points you get at the end of the game and the icons for that look like this our artificial lake in our hand would give us one victory point at the end of the game if we have played it so the yellow player can draw two random cards from the top of the deck and then of course at the same time the rest of us are playing the red player has decided to put a blue card down this is an aquifer pumping card and it does have a building tag on it so that means each of their steel will reduce the cost of this by two they have two steel so that means this is only going to cost them 10 of their money and down below it has an effect that only can happen during the third phase which is the action phase now it says as an action they can spend 10 of their money to flip an ocean tile and this cost is reduced by two money for every steel that they have and they already have two steel so this would only cost them six money instead of ten now i'll describe the details of how the action phase works soon for now they can just place this up here into their tableau well now that we have all performed this construction phase we can flip that over and since there are no other face up phase tokens that means the resolve step is done and we can move into the third step of each round which is called the end step at this point each player has to check their hand size and if they have more than 10 cards then they must select cards to discard until they go down to 10 and all discarded cards go into a face down discard pile now every card that you discard is going to gain you three money in fact whenever you need money for doing anything in the game as a free action you can actually discard any card in your hand in order to gain three money that you can then use to do whatever it is you are trying to do that means if we end up drawing cards that just don't work for us we could always get rid of them for three money to play the cards that we do want to play into our tableau the final thing we do during the n-step is flip over all of these tokens so that they look like this but as you saw i like flipping them over as we are actually going through the resolve step to know exactly what phase we are currently on all right we finished the first round of the game so now we can move into the second and the first thing we do is a planning step now just like before we have to all simultaneously select one of these phase cards and that will be the phase that we triggered to happen but as you can see we all have a card on the table already now during the first round obviously we chose one from these five but for the rest of the game whenever we select a phase we cannot select the one that we chose in the previous round we can easily see that because that card is on the table still and not in our hand so that means we can either choose construction action production or research well let's focus over here and remember we just played optimal aerobraking which is going to gain us two heat and two plants whenever we play an event card we currently have two event cards in our hand and we also have a blue card so i think we would really like a construction phase to happen so that we can play these out and start to gain those benefits of course we could choose a different phase if we wanted to but if no one chose construction then we would not have the chance to play these down also the bonus for construction letting us put multiple cards into play does seem pretty good especially considering we have a decent amount of money at the moment so i think we are going to select construction and then we are going to put this face down tilted at 90 degrees on top of our previously placed phase card once all players have done this that is the moment where we can each take our previously played card and put it back into our hand and then we can flip over the selected cards for this next round of the game so we chose construction the yellow player selected the production phase and the red player selected it the action phase since we don't have any duplicates it looks like we are going to have three phases happen during the resolve step of this round and again we always go from the lowest number to the highest so at this point we can now all perform a construction phase and since we are the only player to put this card out we are the only one who will gain the bonus of drawing an extra card or playing an extra card so let's focus back over here and i would love to play both of these events to maximize the benefit from this optimal aerobraking but you'll notice this artificial lake has a requirement whenever card has a requirement it will have a check mark right here and this will describe the icons that show up this says in order to play this artificial lake the temperature track for mars must be in the yellow area or warmer as you can see up here it shows yellow and white as colors as well with that thermometer and this requirement is associated with the temperature track over here on the board as you can see the temperature track and oxygen track are split into purple red yellow and white areas and this card right here can only be played when the temperature is in the yellow or white area now yellow is minus eight degrees celsius and currently we're at -30 so we are nowhere near being able to actually play this card so even though it is tempting and we would love to place this out we will have to wait quite some time and in the meantime we might just hold on to it or end up getting rid of it for three money to play a better card for us instead of waiting until this is playable that being said this other card that we have is definitely playable that only costs us one of our money and then it says we can immediately draw three cards and then keep one of them and discard the other two now we can put this down here or there or we could start a third stack if we wanted to and i'll just splay these out like this so let's draw the top three cards from the deck and there is an event as well as two of these green cards now this moss says it can only be played once three ocean tiles have been flipped and you also have to spend one plant to put this out and it would increase our plant production by one although at the moment none of the ocean tiles have been flipped so this is not currently playable the next one is power plant and this one does have that energy tag which we have a minus three money discount for and this simply increases our heat production by one so that means this card would be free because that would be three minus three the other card option is a comment which is quite a bit of money at 25 and it says we would raise the temperature one step and we could flip an ocean tile each of these things will help terraform mars and that is something that we are trying to do and we do currently technically have enough money to play this so you know what i think we're going to go for the comment even though this power plant does lean into our thor gate synergy i think our timing for this comment is too good at the moment so we will discard the other two cards into a face down pile and then because we played an event card our optimal aerobraking will activate which is going to get us two heat and two plants and we can track that by putting two of these universal tokens into each of those areas on our board well as a construction bonus we could play another red or blue card and we just picked up this comet so i think let's go for it that is going to cost us 25 money and we have 27 so we now have just two money left and then since this is an event that is going to get us two more heat and two more plants so we have already really leveraged our optimal aerobraking effect this means we have four heat and four plants now and then at the bottom of this card it says we can raise the temperature one step and then flip an ocean tile so let's focus back on mars and when we increase the temperature one step we move this token once and every time any player does something to help terraform mars they're going to gain one terraforming rating so that just helped the terraforming project which means we can now gain one terraforming rating which also is a victory point and it will increase the amount of money that we make during production and it looks like i will be describing how production works later on in this round now the other thing this comment does is it lets us flip an ocean tile and as you can see there are nine of these that are currently on the desert side now these were randomly placed out here on the board and their specific position does not actually matter so we can choose any of these and flip it over and we'll go with this one now on the back side of each of these is a random bonus this one right here is going to let us draw a card from the top of the deck and add it into our hand and then since this was us helping to terraform the planet we will gain one terraforming rating which means our terraforming rating is now up to seven let's focus back over here and the card that we just got from that ocean is diversified interests it costs 15 money to play and it has an immediate effect that says you gain three plants and three heat once and then this has an ongoing effect of increasing our plant production by one at the same time we are constructing so is our opponents the yellow player decided they wanted to play this extreme cold fungus now that has a requirement it says that the temperature must be in the purple zone and that is the coldest zone so that is the case as you can see as the planet gets warmer you will be unable to play extreme cold fungus which thematically makes sense now this is going to cost them 10 money and currently they only have three now technically they do spend one less money for all of their cards so that is going to cost them nine money but again they are six short fortunately you can always discard any card from your hand to gain three money so they are going to discard both of these cards to gain three money each they can add that six to this three which means they now have the nine money exactly that they needed to spend in order to play this card now the effect of this card shows a blue background and it says this is an action and these are activated during the action phase which has been enabled for this round so i'll describe the details of how that action works soon now red also has a chance to construct at the same time but unfortunately for them they are not going to be playing any cards they certainly have a decent amount of money and they could get rid of cards to gain more money so it looks like they either don't have any red or blue cards or the ones that they want to spend have requirements that they don't currently meet this means red is going to do nothing during this construction phase and at this point the construction phase is over that means it's now time for the first action phase of the game well let's focus on the action card and it says that each player can activate any action effects and standard actions action effects will say action like this and they will also have a blue background area with these icons and show that roman numeral 3 to show that this activates during the action phase of the game action effects will also always have a red arrow because that is the specific action that is happening now during the action phase each player can activate each of their cards once although the bonus for the player who put this card out says they may actually activate one of their cards a second time well let's start with the red player this says as an action they can spend 10 of their money to flip over an ocean tile and for every steal that they have they will reduce that cost by two they have two steals so that cost is reduced by four so they can do this action by spending six of their money and after doing that they can flip over an ocean tile they've decided to flip this one here and that is going to gain them a card as well as one money that they can add back into their area this is also going to increase their terraforming rating by one so they've finished that action and again you can only perform each of these once per action phase unless you're the player who put this action card out in which case you can choose just one of these cards to do a second time currently they only have one card so that is the one they've decided to choose so they can once again spend six of their money and that will let them flip another one of those ocean tiles this means three out of the nine ocean tiles have been flipped at this point in the game which is pretty quick if i'm being honest and once all of them have been flipped any future actions that talk about flipping will not have any more effect so red is going to gain another terraforming rating and this specific ocean tile is going to give them a card as a bonus well red is done activating their actions on cards but remember we can also perform standard actions and unlike the cards we can perform as many standard actions as we want during this phase and as you can see the standard actions are printed at the bottom of our board now we can spend 15 money to flip an ocean which we've already seen we could spend 14 money in order to increase the temperature and we can spend 20 money in order to take a forced token those tokens come from a general supply and after you take this you simply leave it in your area and every fourth token is going to be worth one point at the end of the game also whenever you do this you will increase the oxygen level for the planet which will of course give you one terraforming rating which is worth a victory point so as long as the oxygen track is not already maxed out by performing this you get two points one for the track and one for the forest token now there are two other standard projects that don't cost money this one over here says you can spend eight of your heat in order to increase the temperature once and that one says you can spend eight of your plants in order to gain one of those forest tokens and increase the oxygen level now these two are special because whenever the action phase happens if you have the plants and or heat to perform these projects then you must do so this means you cannot hoard your heat and plants as soon as you hit the minimum threshold to activate those you must do so but again that only happens when an action phase is activated well let's focus on our area we don't currently have any cards with actions and unfortunately we don't have what we need in order to perform any of these standard actions once again we need eight plants in order to take a forest token and we have four and we need eight heat in order to increase the temperature once and we have four now our heat production is at four so when production happens later on in the round that is going to gain us for more heat which will get us up to eight but unfortunately the action phase always happens before the production phase so we won't be able to use that heat to increase the temperature until later on in the game let's now focus on yellow's area and they do have one card that has an action now you may have noticed that their corporate card has that red arrow action on it but this is not actually an action instead this is an effect because of that purple background it says that whenever they spend plants for a standard action in order to gain a forced victory point token they get to spend one less plant that means the yellow player only spends seven plants in order to take a token versus the eight plants that the rest of us have to now they are going to activate their extreme cold fungus at this point because this blue background means there is an action for them to perform and this says they can either gain one plant or add a microbe to another card you can see that asterisk right over there now at this point you might be wondering what a microbe is and it's just one of these tokens now if a card needs microbes it will specifically say so and you will put these tokens on top of that card and every one of these will represent a microbe because the card they're placed on says so in this case the yellow player does not have any cards that need microbes so they are simply going to use this action to gain one plant and they can add that directly into their plant storage area well yellow is done with their actions and in fact we are all done with the action phase so we can now move on to the production phase of the round the way this works is we can each look at our board and we are going to gain money cards heat and plants according to our tracks let's start up here with money as you can see our tracker is currently at the zero mark but for money in particular we add this production to our current terraforming rating and that is the overall amount of money that we gain this is why we all start at five terraforming rating that essentially means we all start with a money income of five now our terraforming rating is at seven so that means we are going to gain seven money from this track plus zero from our player board which means we are going to gain seven money total from this production after that this track tells us how many random cards we can take from the top of the deck we are currently at zero but there are production cards out there which will increase this track which then means you will gain cards during this production step let's move on down to our heat production and here we are at four that means we are going to gain four heat and i'll just put a five here and then remove one and that means we now have eight heat in this area so the next time an action phase happens we will be forced to spend that eight heat in order to increase the temperature once on mars and of course when we do that we will gain one terraforming rating which is going to be worth a point and we'll increase our money production by one so this is certainly something that we want to do over here the last thing we can produce is plants but our tracker is currently at zero so we will not add any more into this area now once again every phase in this game happens simultaneously so that means red and yellow are also going to run their productions and the yellow player is going to gain the production bonus as you can see that simply gives them for money so they add that to the other money they would have gained so they can take four more and put that into their area all right production is done and we can all check our hand sizes and it looks like we all have 10 cards or less this means we can move into the next round of the game where we can all simultaneously choose our new phase card so let's focus over here now if we make development happen then we could play one of these four green cards which is a pretty good idea the action phase won't do a lot for us although we could spend our heat to increase the temperature once we just saw how the production phase worked for us we got seven money and four heat so that was pretty good as well and getting four more money would be good but i'm not sure if we want to produce right now and finally there is research we haven't seen this phase just yet and it's pretty simple all players simultaneously draw two cards from the deck and then keep one of those two cards and the bonus ability for the player who puts this out means they get to draw three additional cards and keep one additional card which means effectively those players draw five cards and keep two out of those five and discard the other three now this is great if we are digging for certain things and it certainly would be nice to get more events that we could play as well as cards that have that energy tag but we do have some pretty good cards in our hand as well at the moment so i think let's just play the development card so we can get one of these green cards into play all of these have production bonuses and i imagine there will be more production phases soon so getting these into play earlier means we will get them activated earlier and i definitely like the idea of that we've all made our decisions so we can flip over our selected cards and it looks like we have two people that went for development and one person went for research so those are going to be the two phases that we perform and we will start with development which means all players can play one green card and the red player as well as us will pay three less money for it as a bonus so let's focus down here and at the moment we have just nine money although we have effectively 12 buying power due to that bonus also we have a bunch of cards in our hand and remember we can discard them for three money each well let's take a look at the four green cards that we currently have and the first one is insects that one costs 10 money so we could afford it right now and it says during the production phase this produces one plant for every plant tag that we have now once again tags show up in this area of cards so that means based off of the tags on this card and the other ones that we have played including various events we will increase our plant production unfortunately at the moment it looks like we don't have any of those tags and it is worth noting that each of these corporations also has a tag on them which can apply to various cards that match up with that tag so it obviously does not make sense to play insects at the moment because that would not give us any benefit but i would like to point out that for effects like this when they go into your tableau this is actually ongoing that means in the future if we play a card with a plant tag this will activate and increase the amount of plant production that we make so we could play this right now and not gain anything for it and then in the future play diversified interests and that plant tag would increase our plant production by one from this insects card the next option we have is medical lab and that costs 15 money which we can't afford just yet we would have to discard one card to make that happen now this has a building tag on it and it has this icon which means at the end of the game if we play this into our tableau that will gain us one extra victory point now for production this says we would gain one money for every two building tags that we have in our tableau this adds one so we need another one in order to increase our money production and unfortunately so far we also don't have any of those tags so if we played this it would not do anything for us but if we then played this one in the future or this one first then that would match up and start to increase our money now down here we have diversified interests this says we immediately gained three plants and three heat and then during the production phase this would increase our plant production by one this does cost 15 which means we would have to discard a card to pay for it and the last option is commercial district this is a strong card it costs 25 money and we would have to discard a few cards to make that happen but you'll notice down here it's worth two victory points at the end of the game and it would increase our money production by four for the rest of the game now money production is a really important factor in this game because obviously every card costs money so increasing our production by four is definitely something to consider so i would love to play this card but we have to see if it's actually worth it once again we have nine money over here and a discount of three so that means that would be 12 out of this 25 money taken care of which means we would need 13 more money and we would have to discard five cards and that would be every single other card that we have in our hand so that is probably not worth it even though i would love to gain that benefit so i think what we should do at this moment is actually play diversified interests that will also incentivize us playing insects later on because that plant tag will start to get us more plants now this does cost 15 money and that is lowered by three due to this bonus which means we still have to pay 12 more money and we have nine so we can spend this nine and we need three more money which we can gain by discarding any one of these cards that are currently in our hand up to this point we've talked about all of these except for steelworks now this one does have a building tag on it and it is worth one point at the end of the game and it would give us an action that we could use during the action phases this says you can spend six of your heat to gain two money and to increase the oxygen by one step remember normally we are spending our heat eight at a time to increase the temperature so this would give us another avenue to spend our heat i really don't think we want to discard this card honestly i'd like to get this one in play soon if possible so we are going to have to get rid of one of these other four in order to pay for diversified interests now this has that plant tag on it which means i don't think we want to get rid of insects that's relatively cheap and there is a pretty good synergy there so that means we have to get rid of one of these three now i'm tempted to get rid of medical lab because it doesn't really do much for us but we are probably going to see more of those building tags throughout the game as you can see we have three of them right here if we end up getting all three of these cards played now the one we should probably get rid of is artificial lake i would love to keep this to activate our optimal aerobraking but this needs the temperature to be at yellow or warmer and that is currently 10 temperature increase steps away from happening 10 is quite a lot so i think let's get rid of this and get three money for it instead and hope to get a bunch of money together to get this played in the future saving up to get to 25 is quite a bit so maybe holding on to this isn't the smartest thing but we'll just have to see what we end up doing as we continue to play so diversified interests can add to our tableau that will increase our plant production by one up to one which isn't a lot but remember we are also gaining plants when we are putting these events down and we are hoping to continue to get up to eight plants as often as possible to start cashing those in to get forest tokens and to increase the oxygen level in addition to that remember this diversified interest will get us three plants and a three heat which means we now have seven plants and we have 11 heat total we are done developing and our opponents are also doing this at the same time the yellow player decided to play a coal imports that will cost them 13 of their money so they are going to discard one card to gain three and they can add that to the nine they have which brings them to 12 and then they have a minus one discount when playing any card so they can play for this 13. that is going to increase their heat production by three and then up here the red player has decided to play power grid this will cost them eight but it does have a building icon on it so that is going to be reduced by four because they have to steal and then they played the development card which lowers the cost by three so they only have to pay one money to put this out and that is going to increase their money production by the number of energy tags that they currently have and this card does have one of those tags they don't have any others at the moment so that is going to increase their money production once and obviously in the future if they play an energy tag that will increase their money production so it looks like they're hoping to find energy tags just like we are the development phase is done and the next phase to activate is research remember for players who did not play the research card they are going to draw two cards and keep one and discard the other and players who did play this research card they are going to draw five cards from the top of the deck and then they are going to keep two of those and discard the other three so let's take a look at the two cards we just gained and we have to select one of them the first one is filter feeders this is a blue card and as you can see it has a purple background which means this has an effect now before we even get to that you'll notice this has a requirement there must be two ocean tiles flipped and currently there are three ocean tiles flipped so technically this is playable and it only costs nine now it has that tag which is the animal tag and this is only important when cards specifically talk about that animal tag if we look down here you'll see as an effect this says that when you add any number of microbes to another card you add an animal to this card now we've already seen an effect like that with this extreme cold fungus that the yellow player has so this would be a pretty good synergy although we of course don't have this fungus that is the yellow player now you'll notice this has an asterisk on that mars icon and that says at the end of the game this is worth one victory point for every three animal tokens on top of filter feeder now whenever this activates you simply take tokens from the supply and you put them down onto that card and then as you can see every three times that happens that will be worth one victory point at the end of the game now at the moment this uh doesn't seem like it's really playing it to our strengths it's definitely an interesting card but not necessarily for our situation the other card that we drew ooh instantly grabs our attention because it has that energy symbol and remember we pay three less money when that energy tag is there this is a power supply consortium and it says during production we create two money and one heat and this is a great card especially considering we get that discount i think this is the one we are going to keep and we can put it into our hand and this one will be placed face down into the discard pile while we were looking at our cards so were our opponents the yellow player has made their decision and taken two cards and then three will be discarded and up here the red player has chosen that card and this one will be discarded alright the research phase is done and no one has more than 10 cards in their hand so we don't have to discard down so at this point we can move into the next round of the game where we once again have to decide which of these action phase cards we want to place out well these are our four options and realistically i think we should either research to get to more cards or run production and i think this is a pretty easy decision we don't have any money at the moment and we have some pretty decent cards in our hand so let's activate production which will also get us for more money as a bonus all right it looks like we've all made our decisions and two of us went for production and the red player up there decided they wanted construction to happen so we can now all perform the construction phase and the red player gets a bonus of drawing a card or playing a second card into their tableau well we can focus down here and we have no money at the moment and only one card that we could technically play and it would cost 15. we don't have any discounts for it and we don't even have enough cards to discard to play it so it looks like we are going to pass on this entire construction phase the yellow player is also not going to play any cards but the red player is they have matter manufacturing that gives them a science tag and it does cost them nine money they don't have any discounts for this so they can spend the nine and as you can see this card has a new action for them it says when the action phase happens they can spend one money in order to draw one card from the deck now the red player can play another blue or red card but it looks like instead they're just going to draw a card for this bonus so this will go into their hand and that has finished the construction phase now we can all produce it looks like we are going to gain 7 plus 0 or 7 money in addition to that we are going to gain 4 heat and one plant we also get a bonus for producing which is for more money and our opponents can also run their production this is done and that's completed a rather quick round of the game no one has more than 10 cards so let's move into the next round and select another phase to play let's focus over here where we have 11 money and i would realistically love to play this steelworks that is a blue card with an action on it and i think we are probably going to start seeing some more action phases happen and i'd love to have this in play so that it is usable when the next action phase happens in order to do that we would have to play a construction card and of course we would not actually have enough money we have 11 and that does cost 15 so we would need for more money and we could get that by discarding two cards from our hand but i have to admit i do like the cards that we have if we played this we would be able to draw a card to essentially refill one of those by deciding which card to remove might be kind of hard you know considering our current money production maybe it is a pipe dream that we could get this commercial district out in any reasonable amount of time so this could be one that we could discard and if we did that maybe we would get rid of this medical lab as well you know i think let's go for it i really do want to get the steel works out instead of that we could always play development and play one of these green cards but getting this out before the next action phase is pretty important i think considering we have 15 heat that we'd like to start spending so we are going to select construction all right we've all made our decisions and it looks like three different phases were chosen the first one is going to be construction the second one is going to be action and the third one will be research all right let's do a construction phase and we will get the bonus of drawing an extra card or playing a second blue or red card now we can actually take this bonus of drawing a card before or after we do our main action and we only have one blue or red card so obviously we are not playing two of them so let's draw a card first because that might modify what we end up doing for the blue or red card we play in this case we found a green card so that is not going to change our plan uh this is aerated magma that has a requirement of having the oxygen at the red or higher level and during production this lets you draw a card as part of production and increases heat twice oh this card also has an energy tag so we get a minus three discount on it i'm definitely going to keep that in mind for the future but for the moment during construction let's build this steel works that we can then activate later in this round because there is going to be an action phase we do have to pay 15 money for that so here is 11 and then as i described before we will discard these two cards here to gain six more which means we have two money left over at the same time we were constructing so was the yellow player they decided to start by playing this work cruise event that costs five minus one for them so that is for money and this as an event says they may play an additional blue or red card this phase remember normally they could only play one and this is that one so they now can play another one after that it says they may pay 11 money less for the next card that they play during this phase and with that in mind they are now going to play this event card which is lava flows that normally costs 17 but that can be reduced by one from this research outpost so they have to pay 16 and then work cruise is going to lower that by 11 which means they have to pay five money which they do happen to have when we focus on this card it says they get to raise the temperature of mars by two steps so it's going to go up to minus 24 degrees celsius and that will also give the yellow player two terraforming ratings now the red player has a big hand of cards and unfortunately they are not going to be constructing any of them during this phase for one reason or another the construction phase is done and now it's time for an action phase at this point all players can activate every one of their action cards once and they can perform as many standard projects as they want to on this round also if a player has 8 or more heat or 8 or more plants then they are forced to spend those in order to increase the temperature and oxygen on mars respectively once again the bonus for being the person to play this action is that you can activate a card a second time and the red player was the one to do this with that in mind let's see what red's going to do first now they are going to begin by activating their aquifer pumping as before that is going to be 10 minus 4 or 6 money of theirs in order to flip one ocean tile and they are going to flip this one here that is going to give them two plants and it will also increase their terraforming rating once so the two plants will go here and then their matter manufacturing card says they can spend one of their money in order to draw a random card from the top of the deck and they are going to do that now at this point they performed all of the actions on their cards but they can now use the bonus on the bottom of their card to reactivate one of those now they have six money so they can afford to do this aquifer to flip an ocean tile of course they also have a huge hand of cards right here which they could use in order to discard to get money to do things like that as well now they could also activate this one again spending a money to draw a card but they think they have enough cards in their hand they are going to go ahead and use this aqua for pumping they will spend six of this money to once again flip over an ocean tile just like that five out of the nine tiles have been flipped already and this is certainly faster than normal obviously this is happening primarily because of that card that red was able to get out early and from one game to the next these different terraforming factors will increase at varying rates now this tile is going to give them a plant as well as one money and it will give them another terraforming rating so the money will go there and the plant will go there and obviously there are only four more of those oceans that can be flipped and it seems like the red player might end up flipping just about all of them in this game and once all of them are flipped well we can all just ignore cards that give bonuses for flipping ocean tiles because they won't be very good anymore since you can't flip them anymore after the phase where the last one is flipped well red is done with their actions and now let's go ahead and do our own now i mentioned earlier that during this action phase if we have enough heat to spend eight to increase the temperature then we must but we only check that at the end of this action phase so if we spend that heat doing other things first then we would not be forced into that now i think the first thing that we want to do is activate steelworks that says that we can spend six of our heat and this will get us to money which we desperately need and it will also increase the oxygen level on mars once this is the first time that's happened in the game and since we did some terraforming that is going to increase our terraforming rating by one now that was our only card but we do have some standard actions that we can do and we are going to be forced into spending this heat so let's go ahead and do it now we can spend eight of it in order to increase the temperature once which will bring it to negative 22 and that will give us another terraforming rating and we also have exactly eight plants and we can spend that in order to plant a forest onto mars this means we can take one of these tokens and we will leave it in our area until the end of the game and each of these are worth one victory point and then that is also going to increase the oxygen level once on mars so it's up to two percent and we once again gain a terrifying rating so we have gained three of those ratings over the course of this one action phase we are done and the yellow player can also be taking their actions their extreme cold fungus is simply going to gain them one plant and then they can spend their plants to gain a forest token normally this costs eight but remember their ecoline corporation card says they spend one less for that so they're going to spend seven of their plants they will gain one token which is worth a point at the end of the game and they will increase the oxygen level on mars once that's going to bring this up to three percent and it will also push this token into the red area which could affect the requirements on various cards that we have in our hands now yellow is going to gain a terraforming rating for doing that and now the action round is done at this point we can research yellow is the one who played this so they are going to draw five cards and they will keep one of these and then the rest of us will draw two cards and keep one of those two cards so let's take a look at these cards and the first one is biothermal power right off the bat it's got a energy tag which i like to see so we have a three money discount for it and it says we would gain a forest victory token and raise the oxygen one step when we play this so that's great and it would increase our heat production by one so this is a great card the other one is caretaker contract it requires the temperature to be at yellow or white which we are still a decent ways away from and down below it says as an action we could spend eight heat in order to raise our terraforming rating one step now this card might be confusing because remember you can spend eight heat as an action to increase the temperature once which does give you a terraforming rating and this seems to be doing the same thing however once any of these tracks have reached the end or once all of these tiles have been flipped then in all future phases you cannot actually progress on any of those anymore that means once the temperature has maxed out we could actually use this card to continue to spend the heat that we are making in order to gain terraforming ratings which are of course victory points otherwise if we did not have this then we might end the game with like 20 or 30 excess heat depending on how quickly this track gets maxed out now while we are on this topic i'd like to talk a little bit more about how the simultaneous nature of this game interacts with all of these different factors especially once they are almost done remember players can all take their turns at the same time within a phase and if we had a temperature all the way up at the plus 4 spot then there would be only two locations left on that track now let's say we were in an action phase and multiple players wanted to advance this well every player can advance this as much as they want to even if it hits the end as long as we're within that same phase once that phase is done this track will be completed and for the rest of the game players cannot advance this at all and of course anything that would increase the heat would not increase the terraforming rating the same thing happens for the oxygen track and the same thing happens for these ocean tiles now flipping these over is something that players randomly do when they add oceans to mars and if you are in a situation where there are just two of these tiles left and three of them need to be flipped well the first player to get over here and flip one will randomly choose one and then the last tile that is flipped will attribute its bonus to every other player who flips an ocean tile within that specific phase so multiple players will share in that final one and of course once that phase is over then any future ocean tile flipping actions will be ignored and no terraforming ratings will be applied while we are over here i think now is a good time to talk in more detail about how the game ends as well as how we calculate our final scores now the game is going to end at the end of a phase in which the temperature track is maxed out the oxygen track is maxed out and all of the ocean tiles are flipped now i said phase not round so that means if this was to happen during the development phase of a round and we were going to have an action phase later on then you end the game after the development phase and the action phase does not happen once the game is over players can calculate their final scores by adding their terraforming rating to the number of these force tokens that they have in front of them and the last thing that you can get points for are the cards that are played in front of you many of them have a positive or negative number like this and others have an asterisk like we've seen and those give a conditional amount of victory points depending on the condition printed on that card once players have added up the points they have from their cards their force tokens and their terraforming rating they will have their final scores and the player with the most points will be the winner if there is a tie then the tied player with the most remaining heat money and plant resources added together will be the winner and before players do this they can convert all project cards in their hand to three money each and then they can check that tiebreaker after that tangent about how the game ends let's now return to our turn and realistically i think we should probably take this biothermal power the caretaker contract could be great near the end of the game i do like the fact that it has these two victory points on it but this one is good for engine building earlier on and it once again has that discount and we've been struggling for money now one thing that would potentially push me back towards this caretaker contract is the fact that we already have a couple of really good green cards that we'd like to play technically i'd like to play all three of these so this would be a fourth and remember you can only play one green card in each of the development phases so in order to play all four of these we would need to have four more development phases and we very likely will but we will also likely draw more green cards that we might like even more than say this one right over here it does have the discount and that is certainly nice and increasing oxygen is good but it's possible we'll bump into something that we like better and this could really save us near the end of the game being able to convert heat into points instead of just adding heat up with our money and our plants to try and break a tie honestly this does feel like a hard decision and i think let's keep the caretaker contract uh this also means that we have a blue card so if in the future rounds we have enough money to play a blue or red card and somebody plays construction and we don't then we could play this one out to help us out in the future instead of just passing on the entire phase i think that flexibility is probably good although it is really hard at turning down this biothermal power up here the yellow player is keeping these two cards and discarding these three and red is keeping that card and discarding this one research is done and most of us don't have that many cards although the red player has quite a few in their hand they actually have exactly 10 so they don't have to discard any but if they continue to draw like this they will have to discard down and gain free money for each card that they discard well it's time to decide on a new face card for the next round now before we even look at our cards we can glance over here and see that our red opponent has one money and our yellow opponent has none and i think that is a pretty good indication that one or both of them will likely run production in this round it might not happen that is true but it's certainly something we need to keep in mind now we only have four money so it's not like we have that much more than them and i am tempted to run production but i am also tempted to play a development card to try and get some of these out specifically this aerated magma needed the oxygen to be at red or higher and it is now at red so this is playable i suppose this one is pretty expensive though that is 18 and we have a minus three discount from our corporation which brings it to 15 and then we only have four so we would have to come up with 11 more money which we could get by discarding all of these cards so i would love to play this one right now but i think we have to wait a little bit but when it comes to these two other cards i think they are much more affordable now we also have to keep in mind that we get a minus three discount on money because of development but i still think this aerated magma is too expensive but this power supply consortium might not be this is a cost of 12 minus three for our corporation minus three more for this card which means it's down to six and we have four money over here so unfortunately we would still be two money shy but we could make up for that two money by discarding one of our other cards these two over here are quite good and honestly insects might not be worth holding around it would increase our plant production by one because we would increase it to buy one for every plant tag that we have but we just have that one plant tag and looking at our other cards we don't see any other plant tags coming in the near future so this is good i do like having those plants but i think i would rather turn this into three money in order to pay for this which will help increase the amount of money that we make when we run production and give us more heat and obviously we are very flexible at spending heat by increasing the temperature and the oxygen so that should probably be our focus considering this is playable with the development card i think that is going to be the phase we are going to enable all right let's reveal the new phases and it looks like two of us went for development and one person did indeed go for production all right let's develop and we get a minus three discount on the green card we play and so does the red player so let's go ahead and play this power supply consortium i've already described why we want to do this that is going to cost 12 minus three which is nine minus three more which brings it to six then we can spend for money which means we have to spend two more and we will get rid of insects and that means all told we have one money left over and then this card is going to increase our money production twice and it will also increase our heat production once up here the yellow player unfortunately does not play any cards during this development phase but up here at the top red is going to play one that is an underground city it costs seven minus three for this bonus minus four because it has that building tag and they have to steal so they can actually play this without spending any money at all now this card is going to increase their money production once so it goes up to two and it will also increase the amount of steel that they have so that is going to bring this up to three remember every time they increase their steel production they will gain one terraforming rating which means that's brought them up to 11. the fact that they have a three steal also means they get a minus six discount on cards with that building tag now i've just realized that up to this point i haven't actually described what titanium does it's very similar to steel it gives you a minus three discount for every single one of these for cards that have a space tag on them that tag looks like this we played this earlier on and if we had had titanium when we played this optimal aerobraking every titanium would have lowered the cost by three development is done and now we can all simultaneously run our production and yellow will gain four extra money because they played the production phase card well our terraforming rating is currently at 10 and our money production is at two so we can add those together and that means we are going to gain 12 money then we will draw zero cards and we will gain five heat and we will also gain one plant now our opponents can also run their production at the same time we are well production is done and now we can finish the round it looks like the red player does not have more than 10 cards at this point although they still have quite a few in their hand this means we can move on to the next round and everyone can simultaneously select a phase card well let's focus over here and at the moment we have just two cards and one of them is green while the other is blue we already have our development card in play which means we cannot play it again so we could hypothetically use construction in order to play this caretaker contract but honestly i mostly took this for flexibility later on in the game and i think our biggest weakness is actually cards we could use some more so let's choose a research that way we can draw five cards and select two of them whereas everyone else will draw two and just keep one also by drawing five cards we are more likely to find events which obviously give us extra heat and plants and we are also more likely to find these power plant tags which give us discounts we've all made our decisions so now we can reveal them and two people chose construction and we went for research so those are the two phases that will happen and now everyone can simultaneously construct let's go ahead and start with ourselves we have 13 money at the moment and the only blue or red card we can play is this caretaker contract and it costs 18. it does not have any other discounts for us at the moment which means we are currently missing five money that we would need and we only have one other card which we could discard for three money so it looks like there's no way to play this and we are going to pass on this construction phase meanwhile yellow has decided they want to play this blue card that is restructured resources and it costs them seven minus one for that card right there so that's going to cost them six now this has an effect it says whenever they play a card they may spend one of their plants in order to reduce the card's cost by five money now you can only do that once per card but still spending a plant for five money is a pretty big deal considering yellow does make a decent number of plants already now they do have to spend six money to play this card and because they selected construction they can as a bonus draw another card or play another red or blue card from their hand it looks like they've decided to draw a card up here the red player has decided they want to play this earth catapult this has a pretty high cost of 24 but it does have this building tag and it also has an earth tag which by itself doesn't do anything but there are many cards that interact with the earth tag in a variety of ways now this is going to give them a minus six discount because that is two less for each of their three steel so that means right now they have to spend 18 money to play this and they have 14 money this means they are going to have to discard two of their cards to pay for that but they have a bunch of cards so they're not worried about losing a couple of them these are the two that are discarded and that is going to gain them six credits remember they need to spend 18 credits so they can spend 12 plus the six from these and that leaves them with two left over and now they have this earth catapult in play that will give them two points at the end of the game and it says for the rest of the game whenever they play any card they pay two less money for it so that is a very flexible discount as they continue to play now they also selected the construction phase so they can play another card or they could draw a card and despite having a pretty big hand they are going to draw another card the construction phase is done so now it's time for research our opponents will each draw two cards and choose one and we get to draw five cards from the top of the deck and choose two of those well let's take a look at these cards and the first thing that jumps out to me are the two events remember we gain an extra two heat and two plants every time we play an event so that makes me more interested in these one of them is a lot cheaper than the other the cheap one is a lagrange observatory and when we play it we simply draw a card and this is worth one point at the end of the game the other event that we have costs 30 money which is a ton and it is demos down this is actually crashing the moon of deimos into the surface of mars now when you do this you raise the temperature of mars three times which of course will increase your terraforming rating by three as well and it also gains you seven money uh so that is a bit of a rebate considering it is a very expensive card already you of course still need to get up to that cost first unfortunately at this point in the game we don't have any titanium because each titanium would lower the cost on the space tag cards by three well i'm very interested in the lagrange observatory and partially interested in demos if we think we can afford it later next up we can look at these three cards this is greenhouses it costs 11 and we would need the temperature to be at yellow or white and we are still about 10 steps away from that happening now this says as an action you can spend up to four of your heat to turn that directly into that amount of plants so that is another way to be flexible with a bunch of heat if you do have a good amount of heat production we do and we also gain heat from this so i do like that flexibility although it would be a while until we could play this the next card is mars university and that is worth a point at the end of the game and it has a ongoing effect it says whenever you play a card with a science tag like this you may then discard a card if that card has a plant tag on it then you draw two cards otherwise you draw one so essentially you can cycle cards when you play science tag down and if you get rid of those plant tags you get even more we do have another card over here with this science tag and that is gene repair now this has a requirement we have to have three of the science tags already in our tableau before we can place this out and at the moment we have one although we are very interested in the lagrange observatory which would give us another now if we were to play this that would give us another science tag and it would also get us two points at the end of the game and increase our money production by two so now we have to decide which two of these cards we are going to keep one of these i think should certainly be the lagrange observatory that works out really well with this optical aerobraking and it's also relatively cheap now i would love to keep demos down i'm just worried it's going to take forever for us to actually play it our current money income is at 12 for each of the production phases so it would take a couple of those to get up to 30. but this does pay 7 money back so it's kind of like it's 23 money and it also increases the temperature three times which is great you know what i think we're just going to keep it i'm not sure if we will get it played but it is something that we can potentially work towards and in a worst-case scenario we can always get rid of it for three money these other three are nice but they're not super calling towards me any more than demos down is so let's think big and hope to get that one played in the future up here our opponents have made their decision so these cards will be discarded and that research phase is done this means we've reached the end of another round and no one has more than 10 cards in their hand so now we can once again decide on a phase card to play these are our current options and i have to admit that i am leaning towards production right now we make 12 money but this would actually have us make 16 and if we added 16 to the 13 that we had already that would get us all the way up to 29 money which means we would be just one off playing demos down we could discard one of our other cards to fully pay for it and then when we play this it gives us seven money back it gives us some extra benefits over here and of course it would increase the temperature three times which would increase our money production by three as well now another perk towards doing production right now is i'm not sure if our opponents are going to and if we produce we will make more heat and then on a potential action phase in the future we can use more of that heat in order to use our steel works as well as performing the standard project to increase the temperature of mars now we could of course go for something else and hope that a different player goes for production but if we don't do that then we won't get the for money as a bonus you know what let's just go for it we'll put a production down over there and it looks like everyone else has made their decisions so now we can flip these up and it does look like somebody else went for production but again we are going to gain for money as a bonus for choosing that so production is going to happen and development is going to happen and now we can all simultaneously do development now we actually have a tough decision to make right now the current plan is to make a bunch of money with the production and then play the most down in the next round but another option is playing this aerated magma right now this is the only green card that we have so we either play this or we don't do anything in this phase and this does have a power plant tag on it which means we pay 3 less money for it that means the overall cost for this is 15 and we have 13 money so that's not quite enough to cover it but this card is actually pretty great it does require oxygen to be at red or higher and it is technically at red and if we play this out it would increase our heat production by two during production and we are about to run production and this would increase our card drop production by one this is tracked over here and you simply draw a random number of cards from the top of the deck equal to your draw amount during production so playing this right now before a production happens feels like a pretty strong move i love the idea of getting deimos down played but the more i consider this the more i think aerated magma is probably the better play for the moment this is an engine building game and i think that is going to build our engine out a little bit better so let's go ahead and play this once again we pay three less due to our corporate card and that means we have to pay 15. we have 13 here so we do have to get rid of one of these three and i know i've been pushing for demos down a bunch but i think this is probably the one to go lagrange observatory is very playable to get this bonus and we are keeping this caretaker contract to use it later on in the game if the temperature track maxes out actually we do have the steel works that does give us an outlet to spend the heat that we have and that would gain oxygen and if we can't spend heat to increase the temperature and we can't spend heat to increase the oxygen then the game is probably just about over so i might be over prioritizing this card and yeah let's actually get rid of this one even though i've talked it up a bunch and keep it demos down for the future we'll keep the dream alive of crashing this into the planet now this card is going to gain us three money and we only needed to spend two more so we have one money left over and now we can add aerated magma down to our tableau that is going to increase our heat production twice so it is all the way up to seven and we really do make a bunch of heat so it's good that we have a few ways to get rid of it and then that will also increase our card drop production by one bringing it up to one we are done developing and we can look up here to see what yellow is doing they have a discount of three when they are playing a green card and that is going to be zeppelins this requires the oxygen to be at red yellow or white and it is just barely at red so that is fine they have a basic discount of one plus three more being knocked off from that so this is going to cost them six money and they happen to have exactly six money so they can spend this now we can focus on the card and it's worth one victory point and it says during the production phase they produce one money for every forced victory point token they currently have at the moment they have one so that will increase their money production by one and this is an ongoing effect so that means in the future if they gain more of these forest tokens which seems unlikely considering they have a discount for that they will also increase their money production by one because they have zeppelins in play up here the red player has decided to play biomass combustors this has a cost of 15 but remember they pay two less for every card they play so that is going to be 12 and then this does have the building tag on it and they have three steel so that will lower the cost of this by six so that means they have to spend six money on it and they do currently only have two so they will have to discard two cards from their hand to get the money that they need to play it these are the two cards that they will discard and they will get them six money and now they can spend this money so once again that's 15 minus 2 which is 13 minus 6 which means they actually have to spend seven i think i said that incorrectly earlier so they can spend this seven money and then put this into their tableau however there is an extra cost as you can see they have to spend two plants in order to make this biomass combustors which makes sense and they do happen to have a couple of plants over here they got all of these by flipping over oceans these were just the benefits that came from those now this card has the powerful effect of increasing their heat production by five it was at zero so now it's up to five and you'll notice that this card has the power plant tag on it and that means this is going to activate it says for every power plant tag they have they will make one more money during production all right development is done so we can now all produce and we can start by making 10 plus 2 or 12 money after that for the first time in the game we can gain card production that is going to get us a random card from the top of the deck and this is a green card it's pretty expensive this is the beam from a thorium asteroid now that has a requirement of having a jovian tag already in your tableau these are not super common although this does actually have one and at the moment we don't have any in our tableau or in our hand now if we did then we could play this as long as we paid the money it would get us one victory point and it would increase our plant production by one and our heat production by three as it stands now though i think this is probably going to be discarded for three money at some point in the future next up we are going to make seven heat and we will make one plant hold on a second we aren't actually done because the production bonus gets us for more money and we can't forget to take that well at the same time we were doing production so was our opponents and now that production is done we can move on to the next round where we can once again choose a phase card well at the moment we have three cards in our hand which is not a lot so we could do another research action but i think let's just do construction we could use this to play the lagrange observatory that will draw us a card and we will very likely just draw a card as a bonus from this and drawing more cards is not a bad thing considering how few cards we currently have we've all made our choice so now we can reveal them and it looks like we are going to have a construction phase and we are also going to have an action phase and we can jump right into construction now at the moment we are not in a position to play two cards so i think the first thing that we should do is use our bonus to draw a card and maybe that will be a red or blue card that we do want to play instead of this lagrange observatory now this is red this is convoy from europa it costs 14 and when you play it you draw a card and you get to flip an ocean tile now that is definitely an interesting card it is similar to the luke range observatory it's more expensive but uh this one comes with flipping an ocean tile whereas that one has a point pre-baked onto it you know what i think let's get in on flipping those ocean tiles while we can and play this card and keep the lagrange observatory in our hand for the future now this is going to cost us 14 and we currently have 17 money so we can afford this although by spending this money we are once again putting ourselves much farther away from playing deimos down but that might be more of a long-term plan well we've paid for this and now this optimal aerobraking will immediately get us two more heat and two plants after that the convoy from europa is going to let us draw a card and that one is blue it is small animals this is only playable once we are at the red temperature and we are just two steps away from that and it does have an animal tag on it now if we look down here it says this card is worth a variable number of victory points at the end of the game specifically one victory point for every two animals that are on this card once again if there is a token on this card like that that counts as one animal if there was a silver token on there that would count as five now down here this has an effect it says when you gain a forest victory point token like this over here you immediately add one animal onto this card so the earlier you can play this out the better especially if you're planning on spending plants in order to take those forest tokens the last thing we do for convoy from europa is flip an ocean tile there's just four of them left at the moment and let's flip this one and that lets us draw a card and it will get us a plant so we can take the top card from the deck this is a natural reserve it is playable now because the oxygen level needs to be at least at red and then this is worth a point and it increases your money production by two we can also take that plant which will bring us up to five we are done constructing and yellow can go they're gonna start by taking their bonus so that is going to let them draw a card they are not planning on playing two cards out and then they are going to play this blue card this is farming co-ops and it is going to cost them 15 money now they have a base discount of one so they have to pay 14 and they are now going to use their restructured resources and that lets them spend one of their plants to reduce the money cost of a card they are playing by five that means they only need to pay nine money and they happen to have exactly nine money and it's once again worth noting you can only do this once per card but that's still a great way to use resources that you have in order to play the cards that you want to for your engine now this card actually gains them three plants immediately and now as an action they can discard a card from their hand to gain three plants which they put directly into their supply the last player who can construct is red but unfortunately they are not going to be taking part in this phase so construction is done and now it's time for the action phase now why don't we begin with ourselves at the moment we have 15 heat and let's spend six of that to activate steel works that is going to gain us to money and then it will also increase the oxygen level on mars by one that's going to bring it up to four percent and then our terraforming rating will increase up to 11. after that let's spend eight heat in order to increase the temperature on mars by one this will bring it up to negative 20 degrees celsius and it is just one step away from getting out of the purple now that is going to increase our terraforming rating once again and we went up twice in this action round and remember every one of these is also one more money that we make during production so we'll be making even more money in the future well i think we are done with our actions let's now take a look up here to see what actions yellow is doing they've decided to start by using their farming co-ops that lets them discard one of their cards in order to gain three plants after that they are going to activate their extreme cold fungus and simply gain one plant the other option is placing this down as a microbe on a card but they don't have any cards that take microbes at this point next up they've decided to spend eight of their heat in order to increase the temperature on mars by one this means we are officially in the red zone at minus 18 degrees celsius and yellow will gain a terraforming rating after that yellow is going to spend seven of their plants in order to take a forest token normally it costs eight but remember they get a discount of one due to their corporation so they can take this token and it's going to be worth one point to them at the end of the game also as soon as they took that this will activate their zeppelins which increases their income by one for each of those tokens so by gaining that they also increase their money production by one and of course they do increase the oxygen level on mars by one step so it's now up to five percent and they will gain another terraforming rating bump bringing them to ten at this point yellow is done with their actions they are one plant away from being able to take another one of those forestry tokens but i'm sure they'll just use these the next time an action phase happens at this point let's see what red is doing for their actions they played the action card so they can activate one of their cards twice if they want and they are going to start by activating each of these once they are going to spend one of their money in order to draw a card from the top of the deck and after that they are going to spend 10 minus 6 money in order to flip one of those tiles remember this is reduced by two for every steel they have and they now have three steel so they can spend for money and then they will flip this ocean tile and that is going to gain them two plants and it will also increase their terraforming rating by one the two plants will go over here and now they could do either of these again and they figure there's only two more of those ocean tiles left and the more of them they get to flip the less of their opponents can so they're going to activate this once again and just spend for money to flip another ocean tile this is the one they're going to flip and that is going to gain them for money so it actually paid for itself and that will also increase their terraforming rating once and at this point in the game there is just one more ocean flip that's possible for the rest of the game so they will gain for money and it looks like they are done taking actions the action phase is done which means the round is over and now would be the time to choose another phase card for the next round of the game but i think this is a good point to stop playing through the game we've seen about half of the game so far it might not look like it because these tracks are so far down but as the players have been building up their engines they are going to be able to move these faster and faster remember we have demos down in our pocket and when that's played it will bump the temperature up three times it's possible that we're actually two-thirds the way through the game it can be kind of hard to tell as we ramp up our engines so at this point i do believe i've taught just about all of the rules to the game which means this tutorial is coming to a close i hope that you enjoyed learning how to play terraforming mars aries expedition as always i'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including these producer-level patreon supporters if you too would like to directly support the channel in the creation of future videos like this one then please go to johngetsgames.comsupport also if you enjoyed this video please click the like button for it down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel thanks for watching

Channel: JonGetsGames

Views: 5,563

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: jongetsgames, jon gets games, johngetsgames, jongetsgames playthrough, jongetsgames play through, jongetsgames playthru, jongetsgames runthrough, jongetsgames tutorial, jongetsgames runthru, jongetsgames Ares Expedition, Ares Expedition playthrough, Ares Expedition play through, Ares Expedition play thru, Ares Expedition runthrough, Ares Expedition tutorial, Ares Expedition runthru, Ares Expedition review

Id: AFPEwtRtIiE

Length: 82min 24sec (4944 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021