Terraforming Mars is a great boardgame. Sadly, it’s a terrible videogame.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/12/13/misunderstanding-terraforming-mars/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/12/13/misunderstanding-terraforming-mars/
Imagine a videogame adaptation of chess in which you can only play with four randomly drawn pieces.
That’s certainly a pithy summary.
Draws for days.
Not entirely the same, but there are actually several popular Starcraft 2 mods where each player is only allowed to build 1 or 2 types of randomly selected military units. E.g. you can build Roaches and Ultralisks, and your teammate can build Zealots and Carriers. Based on the draws by your teammates and opponents, you then try to put together some sort of coherent strategy. It’s fun but very silly.
That’s sort of what The Duke is and it’s fantastic! Though that doesn’t really degrade your point because it doesn’t sound like something that would work.
I still like it and play it. The biggest missing feature is the post game screen. You cant look at the board from scoring onwards. Post mortems are part of the fun for me.
I guess I disagree about the overall negative review though. For me as a single player gamer who wants to play terraforming mars quickly in an evening it does the job quite nicely.
Edit: Also re: cards dissapearing, i am away from my gaming machine, but I thought you could check your old cards played by hitting one of the bottom icons? I will check tonight, I could be wrong.
A couple corrections:
“back to [E]arth”
“[Is it] because it’s hard”
It’s a great time to post the review, as the (beta) update that includes drafting has also just come out! The update also includes a button that lets you survey the game board state before making a decision, which may somewhat address your complaint about game information being available.
I have been keeping an eye on this as I love Mars and board games, hopefully with this update and more in the future they can make it better.
Does the video game allow you to bump the table when getting up and shift everyone’s cubes slightly so that no one is sure what their income was 2/3 of the way through the game? It’s definitely not Terraforming Mars without that.
No, but the digital deluxe edition comes with a virtual custom tray.
Asmodee has been on a real shit streak with ports lately, this one coming fresh off of the disastrous Scythe game. The UI layout is so bad that it’s actually harder to find information in the digital game than it is just glancing at a physical board. There are about 8 different menus and to find anything you have to go 2 submenus into each, all for information you could easily tell at a glance on the physical board. How massive of a failure for the digital version to be more obtuse with information than physical components?
More importantly, it’s worthless as a game. The AI is braindead and multiplayer is dead. At peak hours you’re lucky if you see 2 games up, and both of their host’s have set a ridiculously narrow rating range so you’re locked out of joining and no one will every join your game. In one month of trying, I was only able to start one multiplayer game and everyone dropped out before the halfway point.
To be fair, a major advantage of physical board gaming is the ability to see the state of the game at a glance. Even the best digital ports can’t compete with many square feet of table space.
They had a digital table with no space issues and screen scrolling. How hard would it have been to put the boards on the table? Scrolling to see them would still have been easier than the mess of menus they dump on you.
And they got rid of the much easier to read popularity/power/objective tracker on the board. It was part of the board and they got rid of it! Forcing you into more awful seb menus to see basic at a glance information.
This wasn’t complicated tableau stuff, it’s extremely basic public info.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t arguing that the port isn’t a disaster. There are plenty of apps that do manage, e.g. Through the Ages. And there are plenty of boardgaming websites that manage to present the board state comprehensively without resorting to clever iconography: boiteajeux, Game Arena, @jsnell’s Terra Mystica site. But it’s also the case that it’s nearly always easier to see the board state on a physical board than on its digital counterpart. I love PBEM and TTS because I’m able to play with people who aren’t at my physical location, but I’d always rather play in person.
Somebody could have made a scripted mod to the Tabletop Simulator version of Scythe and it would have been a better port. That’s how bad Asmodee’s version is.
The real kicker was that I wasn’t eligible for a refund. It counted my time with the beta version to my total Steam playtime, putting me above the 2 hour mark.
From the games I saw on Youtube, you can, at least on the PC! Of course, an HD screen should show the information on a corner, anyway.
Fired it up again. Looks like they finally did add the board info. It must have been recent since they weren’t there a month ago.
Multiplayer is deader than ever though. 8pm on a Friday night and not a single game was up, with only 1 other person in the lobby.
Can u play the game with friends only? That could explain an empty lobby.
That’s okay. I find it to be a terrible board game too.
Terraforming Mars? I agree! It’s a broad appeal filler at best, and loses even that value as soon as someone insists that you have to play with drafting to double the playtime. It suckers you in with false appeal early on but you learn how clunky and limited the whole thing is once you learn it.
On that note, I’m declaring Root the Terraforming Mars of 2018.
And Wingspan the Terraforming Mars of 2019.