Okay so I need to get the ugly part out of the way first because it’s the thing every single person who plays this game complains about eventually, the player mats are flat cardboard and the little resource cubes slide around on them if the table gets bumped even slightly, or if anyone breathes near it. I ended up ordering wooden overlay trays off Etsy just to make my own copy usable, and I don’t think I’m alone in that, it’s basically a rite of passage for this game. The card art doesn’t have one consistent style either, it looks like it was farmed out to a dozen different illustrators with no art direction memo, which bugs me more than it probably should.

None of that stops me from loving this thing. You’re drafting project cards to build an engine that slowly, over the course of ninety to a hundred twenty minutes, turns Mars from a dead rock into something with oceans and forests and a breathable temperature, and the tableau you build genuinely tells a story even though nobody’s forcing narrative on you. What surprised me is how it manages to feel collaborative even though it’s fully competitive, you’re all racing for VPs but you’re also visibly, physically watching the shared planet change color as the oxygen and temperature and ocean trackers climb, and there’s something satisfying about that shared transformation regardless of who wins.

Two player games run long, I won’t pretend otherwise, three or four is genuinely the better count and where the competition for board placement actually bites. And it does drift toward multiplayer solitaire in stretches, especially with newer players still learning their own engine and not paying attention to what anyone else is doing. I’ve heard the comparison to Race for the Galaxy a lot, faster, tighter, better art direction, and that’s fair, but Race doesn’t give me the slow-motion planetary transformation on the table in front of me, and that’s worth the extra hour and the wonky player mats.