The 4 Squares Review - Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

[Music] welcome to the dice tower a series of video reviews about board and card games here are your hosts hey everybody i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia hi i'm roy kennedy i'm mike delecio today we're taking a look at terraforming mars aries expedition this is a card game version of terraforming mars uh it just was released it's this is not the kickstarter version of it which is still on its way um as a side note we played this live yes back in the day so we already knew how it played at least me and mike did right um but we got it in and this is a complete redesign although there's a lot of terraforming mars in it but there's also a basis and they've said it out loud and race for the galaxy so i figured many of us like brace for the galaxy some of us like terraforming mars let's find out what we all think but first here's how it plays the game revolves around mars and this player board keeps track of everyone's terraforming rating which starts at five but this is going to increase as the game goes by this is your base points the rest of your points will come from plant tiles each plant tile you get will be worth a point and then various cards that you put in a tableau in front of you will give you points this one for example gives one point this one gives two points this one is negative points because it's used as other things this one's a variable amount of points based on this so that's how you score points the game is going to start with mars completely non-terraformed and there are these ocean tiles here certain actions will you flip over an ocean tile giving you the bonuses on it when all the ocean tiles are flipped when the heat here is all the way at the top and when the oxygen levels at the top that's the final round of the game and that's when you'll score each time a player flips an ocean increases the temperature or increases the oxygen their terraforming rating also goes up one so there's an incentive to terraform mars each player has their own player board where they're going to keep track of the number of mega credits you have so for example here i have 16 mega credits you'll keep track of the heat that you have in the track of the plants that you have players will also have production tracks here is how much mega credits you get how many cards you draw how much heat you get how many plants you get and then down here you have your iron and titanium and these simply give you discounts on cards based on how high you get these at the beginning of the game players are going to pick a corporation which will show you how much money you start with so if you pick this one for example you start with 20 mega credits and you also start with one titanium production and then a special ability here if i play the mining guild you start with 27 may credits and i start with one steel production and there are many different corporations players are also going to start with a handful of cards marked from one to five and these are the different actions that could be played each round the game is going to revolve around this huge deck of cards players are going to start with eight of these cards and you will try to get more as the game goes by but you're going to be building these cards in front of you in a tableau using these actions each round of the game each player is going to pick an action from their hand the only rule is you can't pick the same action two times in a row once everyone's picked one we revealed them and there are five possible phases each phase will activate if any player picks it so if i pick three and you pick two and a third player picks one then phase is one two and three are all gonna activate but if multiple players pick the same phase let's say this player picked one then the only faces they're going to activate are one and three no matter who plays the card the phase will activate but the bonus only goes to the person who plays the card so what do these different phases do phase one and phase two are very similar these allow you to play the three different colored cards from your hand green blue and red phase one lets you play green phase two lets you play blue and red the person who plays phase one gets to pay three less for their card and the person who plays phase two can draw a card or play two cards of that type so let's take a look at these cards as you build them red cards are the simplest when you play them something happens and you're done like for example this lets you move your terraforming rating up two spaces this one here lets you flip an ocean tile and draw two cards now you keep them like this here because these little tokens here are tags some of the tags matter like this titanium remember if you have titanium you can pay three less to build the cart for each if i had three titanium this card would not cost me 17 mega credits it would only cost me eight so you need to keep that in mind but red tiles you play them you forget about them green cards are very similar when you play a green card you also will do what it says for example this gives me three plants and three heats but green cards will often also usually raise your production levels so this would raise my production of plants by one this one here raises my production um by one heat for each of these planet tags i have including this one so green cards again sometimes they're worth points which you worry about at the end of the game and they have various tags on them those tags usually affect other cards and you can stack your green and red cards like this blue cards are a little different some blue cards give you a special ability like this one here it says whenever i play a card with that arrow on it i draw two cards this one here lets me stack tokens on it as if they were micro microbes which can be points at the end of the game and some blue cards will just straight up give you actions that you can take like this one here speaking of actions that's the third phase that can be done everyone can do all the actions and the cards they have so for example if i had this card in front of me i can spend 10 minute credits to raise the temperature one step and it's five megahertz less if i have five or more blue cards in play the person who plays the action can pick one of their actions and do it twice so i could do that twice if i had it also players have standard actions at the bottom of your board it tells you what they are i can pay 2 mega credits to take a plant token which is worth a point at the end of the game and it also raises oxygen by a level i can pay 14 mega credits to raise the temperature by one i can pay eight plants to take a tree token and raise the oxygen eight heat to raise the temperature one and i could pay 15 to flip an ocean tile obviously when these things are finished when the tracks are finished and the ocean tiles are flipped you can no longer do these but these are called standard projects phase four is production you're simply going to produce everything so if i have three heat here i would produce three heat if i'm at two cards i'll draw two cards if i'm at two plants i get two plants uh mega credits i'm going to get my production here but i also get my terraforming rating so if my terraforming rating was 10 and my token was here i would get 13 of these also if you're the person who plays the uh production card you get an extra four mega credits and then finally five is research it's a new it's the best way to get cards everyone draws two cards and keeps one discarding the other and if you're the person to play the card you'll draw five cards and keep two and this is just gonna continue over and over and over again and the game is really about the vast amount of cards that are in here cards that make your abilities better some cards have prerequisites like this herbivores requires five ocean tiles to be flipped this one requires a red temperature or warmer and so yeah you have to keep an eye on the requirements of when you can play cards many cards don't come with requirements but you also some cards are more expensive those cards are going to do better this for example makes your heat production go up by five it's a pretty good card but it costs 28. it has a steel tag on it so if you have a lot of steel you can reduce that cost but every game is going to be different based on the cards you play [Music] component wise i'm very happy with the cards i think the symbology is really clear i really love the fact that there's a symbol on the card but it also tells you text-wise what the card does so there's symbology and text that's a great way to do it we often make fun of the artwork and terraforming mars the artwork here is much more cohesive and well done i really like the quality of the cards i like the formatting of the cards i think that's good the boards i have the target version so these are not dual layer boards i wish they were these would sit in them but it's not the end of the world if you do knock off you know oh what was my heat production you can simply look at the cards you have and count it up again the main board is my biggest problem with the game these ocean tiles are a pain to flip over these tracks this one in particular the oxygen track this token's too big to move up but it's hard to see where it is but most egregious is this track here the terraforming rating which is the most important track of the game and when you try to put multiple cubes on these spots it's really hard to see where they are this track is way too small and does affect my enjoyment of the game some the rule book very well done very easy to understand i really like how these cubes look for the ones fives and the tens they work well so for the most part the production of the game is really well done my biggest complaint is this track here [Music] taking liz looks before we jump into gameplay did anyone have any comments about the production or the your thoughts the cards again remember we're talking about the target version here sure sure i think overall like the the aesthetics of the game are a huge improvement i know you've talked about that and stuff but i really like the graphic design and the way the card layout and stuff works i felt like it was pretty easy to get into and play everything and everything was much more recognizable and just a better overall feel for the design of the cards yeah for me the big thing is that i do like that they've got text in addition to the oh for sure that's right great so just for usability right i think that the usability across the board is improved now and you mentioned a couple issues during the overview that i echo those concerns with the score track but generally speaking i like the look of the game much better than the original game i'm happy with it yeah the heat track the oxygen track the cubes are really big yeah on there um also the the ocean carryover is sort of meaningless that it's a bunch of tiles and a hexagonal grid sure it could have been a little deck of cards it could be anything it could be a small deck of cards yes um it doesn't mean anything it's just sort of a carryover it's not a problem except when you really stop and think about it you're like why am i flipping over these tiles and there's always like it always happens where people flip over all the easy ones one in the middle you're like oh man that's true there's no reason to pick one over the other so that's really really minor and other than that i don't love the graphic design in this you thought you liked it sure but i'm you're comparing it to the other sure again i'm not gonna be doing that as much except for one big point i'll make later on but um i don't think it's great graphic design i think it's all right i said at the beginning this game was based a lot on race for the galaxy and there's no question i'm actually surprised more companies haven't copied the idea from race for the galaxy where everyone picks an action and if you pick it everyone does it but you get a bonus there's a decent amount of games that do that puerto rico and other things this one it's really strong in it and i personally love that that automatically makes me want to like a game yeah you're right it's interesting it's not like something like deck building where it's like okay here's a novel mechanic and then you saw 50 deck builders within five years or actually that's a very conservative number you're right there there are a few enough that that is notable but i'm surprised more happened also i'm a huge huge fan of like any games that can figure out ways to minimize downtime and i love the aspect of like everybody choosing something and doing it at the same time and utilizing all that stuff at the same time anything that can get all the players engaged in the game at the same time is awesome i mean we busted out a game and it just felt like it just flowed and flowed and flowed because as everybody was learning everything the turns just didn't stop as it was always your turn to do things you know i do wish it had been more different from embrace with the galaxy sure like i spent half of my first play of this being like this is so on the nose for the galaxy yeah i'm sorry i mean you shouldn't you try to distance yourself from a really well-known card game also set in space when you have phases that are there's the same number they are basically the same phases the bonuses for drawing cards i think might be identical i mean it's not at least analogous but very close it's it's just they're so on the neck at no point was the bonus for like draw two cards keep one and then the bonus for you picking it is also do one action oh you get to like break the pattern a little bit well the action no it's just like it's the same thing the action one feels different though that was a different thing where you play the action card and everyone does all their actions and the person who plays it can do one twice that's my favorite part of this game i think that's neat i'll be like i can do that action twice oh that's really cool yeah yeah but i agree with you roy that yeah the pace keeps up oh yeah so i like that about it and i do think it's a robust system i just yeah i can't help feeling like man if you're going to lift something up like that change a little more you know well with the with roy mentioned the downtime being very low that's true but would that come something that you may not like it doesn't bother me at all but realize the interaction in this game is essentially what did you play okay right i don't care one win about anything else you're doing correct uh maybe you move the you might move the tracks up faster than i would want you to but with the take that cards being pulled out of the game right the interaction is very small it doesn't bother me at all because again very similar race for the galaxy i'm fine with that yeah the main point of interaction i guess like you said would either be you know paying attention to how the tracks go but there also is that little it's a little twist but i like it the idea of sometimes there are two or even three phases that you kind of want to fire off and you're like okay what are the chances based on what they've done the other players have done recently that someone else is going to pick that and i can get the bonus i really want but you still get to do that right right that's a fun thing but it's no different than race i don't spend a lot of time thinking about it i feel like it's actually less punishing in this game for those sort of actions like trying to figure out like oh get in the player's head of like what action are they gonna play if they're gonna play that i'll play this this it doesn't matter as much because regardless you're gonna get something good you're gonna get something and in race it can be way more important like with the production and the firing off of certain things in certain orders it can be a lot more anxiety-inducing this one that feels more casual as you're like oh cool you did production i get some more stuff you know that sort of thing but in race for the galaxy ninety-five percent of the time you are building twelve cards only yeah right and this one you're depending on player count there's way more than twelve so me not getting to build a yellow car to my turn i'm sorry green card i would go oh well i'll build it next turn right that's true that's very true and that thing about that watching what other people are doing especially in a two-player game it's uh it's slightly more predictable because you can't use the same card twice exactly and it rates for the galaxy you could so you've got one of four things you can do i can look over there and go you got no mega credits you're making money right i'll make that money and then i'll also do actions or whatever yeah that's the main interaction almost yeah which is fine you want you want the game to move along at a clip i love though the thing that i'm i'm really excited about this is i love the diversity i'll never play the same name of this twice i am not tired now of race for the galaxy but they're a huge deck i mean i'm sorry terrifying marks with this huge deck this has a deck that's equivalent in size and every time i play i'm like uh this one i'm gonna go for heat i'm gonna do animals and science i'm gonna do this and it's just fun and those tracks and how they changed steel and titanium just becoming discounts that whole system works so smoothly to the point where for me i don't know how i'm going to play terraforming mars yeah that train changing energy to heat is gone um yes the they kept all the basics yes there's not the whole planet out there but there's not there's also not a card that says build a city on this one weird spot for no reason at all it streamlines it tremendously but still gives me i know you've been comparing about the race for the galaxy but i really feel like this is a 50 50. there's a lot of terraforming mars here i agree with that which is my point i said i didn't know as much about terraforming mars and i wasn't going to talk about that very much except for one big thing and this is that one big thing i don't know a lot of people that need both right right you know what i mean no i feel like you are there's the overlap is significant enough where i could see folks replacing terraforming mars with this or playing it and then going it's just not different enough i'm going to go even further because i i play terraform mars probably about the same amount of you i've played a few times i haven't played it a ton but i'm not going to play terraform mars again i'm just going to play aries edition just because it's so much easier to get to the table it's so quick i'm just going to continue to play this game this is the game i want to dig into yeah well since we're all saying that although i mean i'm the same way i'm going to choose to play this i like i play terraforming wars quite a bit um and i but i didn't end up keeping it because i was kind of getting over the the expansion uh just sea of expansion right okay i can't keep up with this this is one that i'm going to choose to play because it's quicker and really quickly bringing up something you talked about earlier about the diversity of play it speaks to it being a tactical game right right yes and that's something that that we had talked about off camera a little bit um i am more of a tactical gamer i've mentioned that i prefer tactical games over long-term strategic games that's just my tastes this feeds into that i like the idea that yeah your starting corporation can give you some idea of what you might want to start at but you've got to be willing to pivot because if you're looking for specific cards in that massive deck you may find yourself annoyed right that is that's one of the things that i definitely called out this being very different from race race feels very strategic as you're like i'm going for these specific developments i'm going to try to get these kind of cards i'm going to go long-term military strategy this game is like you need to ebb and flow with the cards you draw you draw a card that works really good with this sort of combo oh it's heat production i'm going to build that i'm going to start going towards some of that maybe you don't get more heat production cards you gotta shift and change your strategy as it goes along so it makes it feel way more tactical as you're just reacting to the things that come into your hand and trying to make the best decisions on turn to turn yeah now you mentioned expansions yes that is where i would say i would play the base game over this game the board game because if you add the board games expansions venus and the different you know if i want that more bigger robust game don't even play this like this isn't going to have a ton of expansions sure but i mean as of now um but let's pretend people you might be watching this and going why you guys keep talking about these two games i never played if you haven't played those i'm going to highly recommend this this is a really interesting game if you haven't played those two first of all you should have but if you haven't this is a solid entry you don't need to have played any other game to play this i'm gonna slightly disagree with you though tom for me just for me as a gamer i even put all those expansions in i would still rather have this experience in a quarter or a half of the time i'm not saying that i'm saying i don't i don't think they're the same then you're saying it offers the same experience i'm saying if you want to play with the expansions i feel like that's a very different sending out the colonies sure that's a very different feeling okay right right that's an interesting idea though i mean now we've talked quite a bit to folks who know race for the galaxy who know terraforming mars i feel like they are well informed at this point because they have great points of reference and we have told you how this is is strategic versus tactic length downtime all you know spatial awareness being a thing that's gone so what happens when you talk to people that don't know those two games i guess the main thing i would say right off the bat is this is heavier than it looks sure this is a complex game it's it also is i think shorter than terraforming mars i wouldn't necessarily say it's short no i think the 16 minutes on the cover is uh very forgiving it is not a 60-minute four-player game unless everyone really knows the game right right right my last play of this was a two-player game there was a lot of building up it took approximately two hours which is fine that was enjoyable i liked it but 60 even for two you're you're booking it you're kind of because you don't have 12 cards at the end i had like a lot of cards in front of me it does scale weirdly right mm-hmm because the game ends when mars is terraformed and those numbers are they're going to happen fast with four people i don't have a problem with that because i felt the engine i just played a four-player game of this a couple days ago and i had a lot of cards out nice so i didn't feel like oh i was cheated out of that but i think i would prefer it with two players because i want my handshake to be i know i just really want to build this gigantic yeah yeah all right wait what do you get what's your final thoughts here i really really enjoy this game it does a lot of things that i really like i love building up combos i love low downtime in game i love being able to do things simultaneously i'm giving this an 8.5 i think it's an excellent game and it's a lot of fun and i'm excited that it's easily available for people to get the game i'm excited for more people to play it i'm really excited to play the game even more um and it's there's a lot of replayability i think out of the base box and i know there's going to be even more coming for it in the future probably with expansions and stuff like that but just based on this base game 8.5 all right z uh i'm giving it an 8. i um i wish it looked better i don't like the i mean the look is a little sort of like i wish it looked more modern maybe it still looks too much like terraforming mars which was never a looker and it's a few years old now but yeah everything we keep talking about mechanically is robust a big one for me that discovery because there's a billion cards for sure so that discovery is going to stay very high where i'm drawing cards and i feel like several games in i'm like dude that's cool i think i got this different card i might have seen and ignored earlier or just haven't seen yet and so there is a nice sense of discoverability over multiple plays and then after that once you get to know the deck well then you can just kind of drill in a little bit deeper so it's a robust game is it innovative no not if you know the other two we've been referencing is it pretty no it's a good game i think a game a long game but a good game yeah and and just for context it is i agree it's not an easy game and it's not a long game but if we are comparing it to the base game of terraforming mars i prefer this in every way right it's quicker it's easier i feel like and it feels just much smoother super fast setup yeah it really is i mean yeah this i will always choose to play this over any iteration honestly of terraforming mars because to me i felt like beyond the base game i didn't love the expansions that's just for me on a personal level so this checks off a lot of boxes for me and i'm giving it an 8.5 i think it's excellent i really do like it i'm going to go a little higher than that if it wasn't for that stupid scoring track i would give this a 10. wow that's how much i like it um so i'm giving a 9.5 i'm thinking at half point for that and i'm just going to go to etsy and find a proper track or something but race for the galaxy one of my favorite games therefore mars one of my favorite games i mean like in my top 50 both of them so this combination yes i sit there and i play it i'm like oh yeah this is the same as both of those yay i mean if you make my two favorite foods and put them together i'm gonna be very happy but it does feel familiar i bet even the first time you played sure and that's a consideration you know again if you are an owner of both of those you got to consider that that doesn't happen to you like when i played kayla's a card game it was like oh this is kayla's the board game it's a card game yeah okay yeah this one felt like oh this they got it better this time and i like the mechanisms i like how fast it is i'd like to build up a different combination when they inevitably make the app version of this i'll play that a ton you know it's gonna be a gamer like ooh what combo can i do now this is solid for me and i'm excited to play more of it so i yes i kind of felt like i was gonna like it going in i read the rules i and i knew this is good and yeah every time i play this i enjoy it um it's fast i think like i said i'm gonna prefer it with two or three just that's the exact same way i feel about race for the galaxy right um the same thing but in the end it's a good good project and um well that's what i got so that's terrifying mars aries expedition thanks so much for watching i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia i'm roy candy i'm mike lucio have fun on the red planet [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 47,109

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: DEUtW7_5QOw

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Codygon]

Big fan of the 4-Squares format.

[u/dictionary_hat_r4ck]

Terraforming Mars: Race for the Galactic TM

[u/GremioIsDead]

I enjoy TM, but didn't keep it. This is much more likely to get played at my house (though probably still not enough to justify a purchase).

Maybe in a couplefew years when my kid gets older, but I'll definitely be watching this one, and I'm interested to see what sort of expansion support it gets (I'm guessing it will be substantial).

[u/Varianor]

"Have fun on the Red Planet." Nice.

[u/RabidPickle]

Played this with my wife last night and we loved it. Very smooth play and the engine building was very satisfying for us (even though my engine sucked). I think it took us 90 minutes maybe but that also involved dealing with small children. Can't wait to play more.

Definitely doesn't feel as good as RFTG to me, but my wife doesn't love that one due to the confusing iconography, so Ares Expedition will definitely get played more

[u/juststartplaying]

I played this last night with my wife and we both agreed to sell it.

It gives up all the thinkiness of TM. Your hand of cards no longer matters because the deck has been homogenized.

It lacks any of the snappiness of Race for the Galaxy. The game is easily 90-120 minutes your first few plays. Choosing a phase feels entirely tacked on. They had to add a rule that you can't pick the same phase twice in a row because your first 5+ turns are prescripted "play a green card to start your engine" turns.

[u/Kyssek]

I haven’t played my copy yet, but I am impressed by the component quality improvements versus the original game. The cards are linen finished and thick. They feel great to hold and shuffle. The art is of course vastly improved. And I actually prefer the colorized, plastic cubes in Ares over even the metal ones that came with TM’s Big Box. They’re light and have a lovely, swirly texture! And no chipped paint!

[u/Lavoisier21]

The playthrough they had of this looked like a mess with the simultaneous play, which will inevitably result in cheating, intentional or otherwise - in fact, some people commented Tom won because he made a mistake on one of his turns. And the removal of the board and milestones and awards will make this even more multiplayer solitaire than it was before. Also hate the randomness with the oceans.

It seems quicker and simpler, but at what cost?

[u/KPater]

I think this will be a popular couples/family game.

Like Race for the Galaxy, which is a great game, but with a less intimidating (and more familiar) presentation.

And like Terraforming Mars, but with less player interaction. Though that's a negative for me, I know some couples/families prefer this.