Tharsis: turn-based spaceship survival with dice rolling!

Never played it. Only FF I’ve ever played is Tactics.

I love that PC/consoles have really seen an uptick in presenting boardgames on their terms (which can be awesome). For the most part, it’s largely been porting existing games to IOS or PC/Android, but man, I’d love to see more original offerings that take on traditional boardgame mechanics like dice placement, worker placement, auctions, etc.

Just not more Armellos, please. :(

One of the best!

Things definitely didn’t end particularly well for anyone in Tactics… :)

The main villain, Sephiroth, goes into space during a 20 minute long summoning attack. Unfortunately he’s not in a spaceship.

-Todd

Huh. I like Armello, but the game could really benefit from a strategic view. If the engine’s capable of supporting it, the devs really should give the players the option for such a view, since it really gets confusing when heroes are moving and an at-glance overview of the “board” is missing. I understand they don’t want to impact the aesthetics of the game, but when they interfere with the gameplay, it’s time to relax the restrictions.

Armello was beautiful, but ultimately a pretty light gaming experience that had a lot of what I don’t like in boardgames (randomness, choices that aren’t overly meaningful, unbalanced paths to victory) and a lot of what I don’t like in PC games to boot. But that’s personal preference, natch (except for the lightness, hard to deny that).

As for this game, it was looking like an instant sale but the measured reviews thus far are making me want to wait and see what more people here think before diving in myself.

The launch discount was enough to make me pull the trigger. Played a little this morning – first game I died in week 3. Second game I made it to week 4, then had to leave for work (but it’s pretty clear I’m gonna die in week 4). I don’t know if I’m going to end up liking it or not – it might be too random, or too light, or something – but it should at least be fun trying to figure out what all the stuff does.

Ok, I’ve played this a bit more now. I still haven’t survived week 5. There definitely is some strategy to it (although, yeah, repeatedly getting bad die rolls can hose you). There were definitely a few rules that weren’t clear to me at first (or that I just assumed worked like they do in Alien Frontiers, which they don’t). Although the game isn’t complicated, and this tutorial page pretty much spells everything out.

But if you’re used to Alien Frontiers, the trick is that the abilities where you have to put two or three dice with the same value in the slot to activate the special ability of the module: you don’t have to put two or three dice in. You can put fewer dice in. The Life Support module gives you back two dice for each die you put in (although of course you don’t get to roll them until the next turn). And two different characters can put dice in (although of course they have to be the same value). And the maintenance module gives you two ship on the second die, which is often cheaper than trying to fix events that damage the ship. It’s all pretty clear in the UI once you know what you’re looking at.

The other thing that confused me at first were the crew abilities – the captain and the doctor. The captain gives one die to everyone else in the room when you activate his ability, and the doctor gives +1 health to everyone in the room when you activate his ability. Perfectly clear, but I had assumed there was some phase of the turn when their abilities would fire; but there isn’t, it just happens the moment you put the 5+ die in their slot. So, for the captain, if other crew members in the room haven’t taken their turn yet, they will get the extra dice for this turn; otherwise they don’t get to roll them until the following turn.

Likewise, if you have a research project that gives you +dice to a crew member, give it to the crew member before they roll their dice for the first time, so you can roll them right away! Can’t believe how many times I made that mistake.

Great game, the high difficulty will make me come back for more… also looking forward to missions and daily challenges.

Does anyone know how they implemented the dice animation? Are they physics based? Or are there hundreds of canned animations?
It looks like the dice react to each other, bumping off each other etc… that would be a lot of programming work to get this right…

Last night I had one die land on top of the other. Fortunately I was able to drag it off.

Developer quote:

They spawn all facing the same way within the dice box and then force is applied to them, they bounce around and then come to a stop as real dice would. Sometimes you see them snap down, that’s to keep them from just sliding around forever. That action is the number generator. There is nothing hidden under the hood determining their end numbers and none of it is predetermined.

Hey, me too!

I made it to Mars with my first game, though I had the advantage of having watched at least one Let’s Play, so I had some strategy lined up. I did lose a crew member though. I tried really hard to avoid cannibalism but I ended up eating the dead guys. One strange thing in this game was that on turn 1 I got some sort of strange disaster in Flight Control - I don’t recall what it was, something like SYS ERR - not a ship damaging event, nor a lose dice or health events. I was unable to get to it the entire game so it fired off every turn (and I still couldn’t tell what the event did).

One thing I recommend is to use the “Hold Dice” box liberally. Whenever I got 5s or 6s I would almost always throw them in the hold box, since there’s no penalty for doing that, and it lets you effectively postpone your choices until you have perfect information about your dice (i.e., no more rolls left).

Also, as noted above, since the characters each have a different ability, the order in which you send them makes a big difference. I would routinely send the Doctor in first to a disaster, since most of the time my characters had high health; I’d send the captain in last since I was always trying to replentish the dice.

Oh yeah, one other thing - the one crewmember I lost was the captain, and when that happens, the voiceovers switch to using a man’s voice. I thought that was a really nice touch.

System Error means that the module’s special ability is offline. It’s not ship or life-threatening, but it can keep you from doing things like growing food.

Getting a first turn sys error in the cockpit is an almost perfect start - you can ignore that thing for the whole game and the only thing that happens is you can’t use the “no damage for movement” ability of the cockpit. I might choose that start every time if I could.

Tharsis reminds me very much of Shadowrun: Crossfire (the card game). S:Cr is difficult as hell, you cannot allow yourself to do any mistakes, you have to deploy your team to different enemies (they are called obstacles), and then you use your cards to drain the enemy healths, every round new enemies appear and bad events happen etc… tough as nails. But in the same spirit as Tharsis. I love them both, but that is telling something about my masochistic nature I guess (did not knew I had one)…

I was just about to survive week 5 for the first time… when the game crashed. Luckily, when I re-started it, I only had to redo that turn (which was annoying, but not terrible). I did survive week 5! But then I died in week 6, because I couldn’t roll a pair (after several tries!) to get one point of repair on the dumb ship.

Does it feel deep enough to warrant multiple plays once the initial glow wears out? Does the game have any sort of randomness mitigation, like an ability to change die faces or increase a number if your rolls are poor? The fact that there’s a Crossfire comparison makes me hopeful that there might actually be some meat on the bone here.

Randomness mitigation: In general, you want high die rolls (to effect repairs and do some actions that require a 5 or 6 to activate). However, low rolls are usually not useless, because they can usually be used for research, and sometimes for other actions (that just require 2 or 3 matching dice). So getting low rolls isn’t always a complete disaster.

Furthermore, you can re-roll all or some of your dice (usually just once, but one character’s special ability is to get an extra re-roll). So if you do get a terrible roll, you get another chance.

On the other hand, each module that has a event going on has some die rolls that are just bad – a 3 might get ‘locked’ (no re-roll), for example, or a 4 might injure your crew member, or a 5 might just disappear entirely (void). This is probably the thing that will screw you over the most. There is some mitigation for this too, though, as you can get “assists” that will cancel out negative effects (and there is even a module on the ship where you can spend a 5 or 6 die to fill up your bar of 3 assists).

Like I said, there definitely is some strategy to it. But you can also just get unlucky and lose. It’s a dice game!

I’ve played it 10 times so far, but probably at least 4 of those only got to turn 2. So whether or not it will hold up after a couple of weeks I’m not sure.

the dice will screw you no matter what. I only made it to week 7… but when I started I died in week 3. There is skill involved, where you put your crews and when and in what order. And there are very tough decissions to be made in every week. This is not a game that is played by itself, most stuff you have to plan before you even roll any die, and you willl need to take into account that you will not have optimal dice rolled…

but you can put useless dice into research, or you can usually trigger the module ability

but the same is true for crossfire, if you do not have the right color, you only can do so much…