Terraforming Mars - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

i love terraforming mars put another algae in the ecosystem oh another beautiful day on the big old dusty uh peach james why are you wearing a space mask we're in space dude did you not hear we just invented trees ah great also technically we're on mars which isn't in space i love trees it's got an atmosphere oh hey i just came to tell you that we're doing some major work in this area so we should probably get out of here around about uh now this makes no sense oh hey kids hey kids this is which ball game are we today it's what the kids are talking about which kids it's terraforming mars a 2016 management game so popular they've already announced four expansions including terraforming mars venus next which is a title that i don't think is fully grasped what colons are for what can you say quinn's where we're going we don't need colons this game is literally worlds apart from other management type games in the fact that it's sexier and it's exciting you're crashing asteroids into the planet you are creating volcanoes and algae l algae algae quince where have you been the kids are loving algae it's all about aldi get your face flaps around this one chin chin mine's a lumpy one that could have been a lot worse oh no it's pretty bad so terraforming mars is a competitive game for between two and five players about who can terraform mars the most you got your mars and you've got your mars bars showing that mars is freezing cold has zero percent oxygen and none of the water that you need to survive here now whenever anyone terraforms mars they increase up this terraforming track and the game ends when mars is suitably warm wet and wild at which point whoever has the most terraforming points is the winner there's just one problem breeding ants or crashing asteroids into the planet to heat things up like a galactic jacuzzi isn't just awesome it's really expensive so realistically it's the richest of you that will terraform mars the most which means you might have to get involved in strip mining putting a security fleet in orbit or flying people to mars for the privilege of working for you for life oh no guys turns out humans are bad in fact barely any of your attention is even going to be on this central map instead players are going to be staring straight down at their personal corporate place setting what's for dinner mum cubes every turn begins with everyone getting a fat stack of uros and drawing four projects that you might choose to buy like maybe you get dealt mars university and some fungus and harvest lightning and some moss every card you want the option of building later is going to cost you three euros meaning you have to decide between euros you need now and projects you might desperately need later because everything else gets discarded and there's a whole massive epic stack of a deck of programs to choose from and things that you can do and it's all grounded in actual real life science probably definitely almost probably and it's got you know real life algae lots of versions of real life algae real algae in your local area now real algae wants to chat real algae call now real algae so lonely when did you get so weird about algae i don't know i'll stop once i've got once i've had my chlorophyll of it you're fired that's reasonable the rest of a round is then spent as players take turns to ring everything they can every last resource out of their place setting like blood from a stone or if you prefer moss from the mars you see you've got euros steel titanium plants electricity and heat these represent the amount you've got of each but these represent the production you have of each so if i build a power plant for four euros i don't just get more electricity i get more electricity every turn for the rest of the game until i spend it by building something that increases electricity and in fact since your victory points are also the money you make it's difficult to do anything in terraforming mars it doesn't explode like a firework display of more cubes and cubes going up and other cubes going down and more cubes going up and suddenly the appeal of terraforming mars is as crystal clear as if you were gazing through a web of transparent moss you see this is a game about starting with nothing if you play the extended version in the back of the manual which we absolutely recommend you do having this silent sheet and then gradually inserting cool projects that you've picked into the company one after another like long thin coins into a corporate jukebox gradually building up income and discounts and prospects and possibilities searching for synergies and then just as you've spent the last of your money building an extreme sports resort which permanently increases your income for the rest of the game and crashing a moon into the planet which gives you a crap ton of metal suddenly you get four more projects you might want with 30 more mega euros and what are they going to be and it's kind of easy to forget that you're here to make mars livable but that's forgivable because yes you're on the hot orange the dusty boy the solar satsuma the last tamale the planet mars and yet the game is only ever almost in turning small numbers into bigger numbers so a lot of the time it doesn't feel like you're on mars so let's talk about theme let's talk about what you're doing let's ask the same question that david bowie asked in his song is mars a lively place to which the answer is yes providing you're really into science algae bacteria other kinds of algae if you're not into science then it's mars is a euro game which means it's largely unable to support vibrant life euro games are things where you will end up prodding away at your own systems and interacting not very much and at the end you'll tot up your scores announcing who won singing the national anthem god save love lovely queen sharing your family's quote of soup for the week and then going straight to bed that's not to say we don't love a good euro game it's just they're not exactly the life of the party as seen here on the party scale uh where we have the euro games just below here uh just below cheese and pineapple on sticks but that's fine because you know i love small amounts of food on sticks and if you love science then this is a euro game with a theme that you will find exciting that never happens i know it never happens but this is finally something for people who like science or believe in science i think it's nonsense every round of the game is a whole generation which means after three or four turns everybody you know is dead but don't be sad because you've you've got bushes you've brought actual bushes to another planet real greenery bushes on mars and throughout the game over a period of two hours you'll have a frozen lake there and a little belch of oxygen here and you'll have turned this hellscape into well maybe not a nice place but a place where you can flounce around in low gravity with your sexuality and bone density much reduced while you gasp for oxygen but you're in a bush you've made bushes so where are we at well it's a satisfying game with an interesting evocative theme but but what separates a good euro game from a great euro game in the minds of our minds is that mechanics allow players to stop focusing on imaginations just in front of their sheets and to look up and to interact not necessarily interfere but to interact with the other people around the table bringing to life the most expensive component of any board game the human beings well said now in terraforming mars obviously we have mars the hot tamale that i'm just gonna yeah so you've got lakes that you can put down and you've got cities and you've got gardens and you're all competing for space but in practice this is kind of where terraforming miles sharpness and speed stops this game is fiddly and it's not enormously rewarding it's also not very impactful it's uh it's literally a big shame a massive ball of shame and the thing is though what brings this game to life where it shines is the same thing as what makes it interesting for the players the cards and it means that when other people are taking their goes you end up like stopping and looking at what they're doing not because you're trying to get a strategic advantage of any kind just because it's cool matthew this turn i am bribing a committee and i'm building a martian railway network it's like in the united kingdom it's like basically southern rail it's i'm genuinely sad much like shuttle is a down favorite race for the galaxy much of the thrill here is just in seeing the cards you play slowly paint a story maybe it's a heartwarming story of humanity's fresh start or maybe it's a grim one earth making the same mistakes all over again where will we learn or maybe it's not maybe it's just funny maybe you're an eco-friendly tech startup that builds an actual volcano followed by a designated nuclear blast zone this humor is tempered by delightfully shonky cardar but mostly it's just the juxtaposition of the utterly mundane with the genuinely extreme you'll move mountains and shift rivers and create oceans but also you'll need algae and pets because what's the point in changing things what's the point in genesis of life if you can't always also have a lovely little cute dog after all it wouldn't be the same without them even if their bone density can't handle it but while you'll find stuff to like in this fluffy martian atmosphere it doesn't change the fact that most of your time will be spent in the crunchy martian soil of cubes and numbers now this is the point in the review where we'd explain the next step of rules the next thing to consider but no honestly we've taught you the whole game it really is simple as draw cards play cards to move cubes and move cubes to draw cards to play cards to move cubes and yet while it's simple to teach it's not that simple to play because a lot of the time you're considering whether to play a card now and change the cubes versus keeping the cubes and then drawing more cards to see if you get a better opportunity you're wondering whether to focus on space stuff and titanium or whether you should be a space guy with titanium who also has some fish on the side because if you focus too much on one area and you draw cards then a lot of them you can't use and while this central board won't be holding much of your attention you'll still see spaces on it that you want to fill and that means wondering whether you have to fill them now or you can just fill them next turn because they'll still be available that's an interesting decision almost but i've got to say that whilst the central board does attract your attention it's usually an economics because i when we played i kept forgetting other players kept forgetting to actually move these oxygen markers and their temperature markers we just got the victory point and got the money and then we're like yeah i got more things and everyone's like yeah we're terrifying mars and we're like oh yeah yeah we are i forgot i keep forgetting we're doing that i just thought it's worth mentioning i'll go now so all that said it doesn't necessarily matter because a side effect of all these economies spinning up as easily as children with fidget spinners is that you constantly have more money you constantly have new cards you constantly have lots of little decisions to think about even if they're not that interesting so there we have it a satisfying game that offers up a lot of richness of storytelling a lot of strategic options a lot of different angles to pursue so many cards to see you can build them and feel satisfied with yourself get a cube and move it on a um so you're going to give it the um the uh recommendation badge i was i thought you were going to give it the recommendations i've kind of got a few more things i want to say about it i i actually have a few more things i was going to say do some more reviews let's just do a bit more of you so i had a great time with terraforming mars and in fact everyone who i played it with did but what became increasingly apparent especially on multiple playthroughs is that i didn't feel like i was truly trying to crack a puzzle so much as i was being expertly distracted you see so much of this game when you actually look at what you're doing is cross referencing all the numbers and details on cards with the resources on your sheet with the map of the board with the cards you've got putting the cards in order that you're going to play them working out which card is flat out better than another given your circumstance it's so much calculation and you see when i play engine building games what i'm looking for is something like a crossword puzzle where i can sit back and ponder and feel clever and consider how clever the creator is whereas what terraforming mars felt like to me and i don't mean this in a terrible way is sudoku where i'm pretty much just doing an awful lot of arithmetic and i'll tell you what there were sometimes in terraforming mars that even felt completely solvable especially towards the end of the game you draw four cards and you go well those two are useless this one i've got a better thing here so this is the only one worth buying and then i'm going to combine that with this other card that's the best possible turn and that's the opposite of what i want from a euro game now paul dean reviewer of this parish isn't here today and unlike matt and myself he didn't like terraforming mars at all and i think i know exactly why you see paul loves management games he plays and reviews them probably the most out of anyone on shut up and sit down and he loves them for letting him explore multiple layers of this incredibly ornate problem where you learn to look at this game from an all-new angle and then realize that brings all new human difficulties and you might share these observations your friends i am going to get up my ass for a moment and call this the sublime of euro game design where euro games are really mysterious and unknowable all of that stuff matt and myself felt was largely absent from terraforming mars and that's okay because it was replaced with something that some people are going to find even better which is calculating efficiency but that's a little less exciting to matt and myself and it's certainly less exciting to paul who doesn't like calculating or efficiency in fact i don't even think calculating efficiency is on the party scale these faults spring to life when you play the game with only two people early game you've got all this wonderful color and tone of the cards you're placing little stories but my mid game endgame that's just gone you've done so many things that it's just stuff you know you're not growing forests and going into space you're tapping that which gives you that and then you get four of these from that and then this turns two of them into eight of them and you know that bit in the matrix where neo goes wrong the whole world is just numbers and code it's like that but you can't turn it off and it's just numbers and mars is gone hello matthew we're coming to the viewers live from near the end of our two-player game uh mars is basically terraformed i've just got one question to ask you does the game make sense anymore no no no let's look at how many cards i've got that seems like yeah that seems yeah so it's very weak with two players two slow with five and then it's plays pretty well with three or four but then you look at other euro games we've covered on the website recently things like a feast for odin or great western trail and these are games that play better with a broader number of people and whilst it does a lot of things it doesn't really do anything interesting and new my favorite thing in the game though by longer favorite thing is this award system which has players visibly buying certain reward criteria for the end of the game there can only be three and they get increasingly expensive forcing players to commit like this early on or late and go like i'm gonna get the most money i'm gonna develop the most heat or the most science getting people to actually put it down in front of everyone visibly is amazing and it creates a gamble mechanic and the fact that do you go early and ensure that you can do it but then can you pull it off will another player see you do that and go no actually i'm going to get more money than you it's a fantastic mechanic we also have to add that the components are very shonky for how expensive this game is especially here in europe the public domain art that they've used to illustrate these cards sometimes is hilarious sometimes it's nice sometimes it looks like pieces of art from two completely different games and these player mats if someone happens to nudge one of them that's game over it's impossible to remember where you were and reset them so you better have some friends who are pretty great with their hands or who are very easy going about you just randomly deciding how much titanium you are making okay now i feel better it's good it's good it is good can i talk about race for the galaxy for a bit yes okay so if you like card powered games that tell stories with a lot of tricky decisions race for the galaxy is half the price no it's not got the all the cubes and it's not a big engine building game but i would rather play race than this and it's cheaper and as far as other euro games go i don't even know if this is in my top 20 it's good it's good it is good but it's not in my top 20 and who needs more than 20 euro again who needs more than 20 euro games i certainly don't i've got room for them no although i will have room for 20 euro games when i finish building my house because i'm currently building a house on mars are you they're just waiting there there'll be a when you say something like this it does uh it goes to like a green screen bit and it's like it's really funny there'll be like a joke to do with me making it just wait do you want to do a joke no no you say something like this and then it cuts to a bit where it's like i'm on mars when i'm building a house and something's gone wrong it's a funny it'll end the video it'll be really funny it should any minute on mars i have to go i mean like i've got dinner plans yeah it's gonna be just a minute no man like i i wish you well um but yeah i love all right i'll see you later everything's okay yeah yeah it's fine any minute thank you yeah oh you missed it you missed it i was on i was on mars but it wasn't funny nothing happened [Music] and england wales and islands george she is a little lovely catch catch [Applause] dogs [Applause] [Music] okay

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 720,702

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Terraforming Mars

Id: TiswoYwwjnI

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2017