Terraformers – Review

When I first caught a glimpse of the Terraformers, I was initially expecting something like Surviving Mars, while the new release from Goblinz Studio follows a similar pattern to making Mars a hospitable home for mankind, the delivery is completely different, giving us a game that feels more turn-based, almost like a deck-building title, rather than colony management.

The main game mode see’s you striving to reach 400 points, similar to victory points in Civilization or Catan, with a turn-based system where you’ll place buildings and explore as you continue to expand your colony around mars.

After placing your headquarters and choosing a leader, you’ll play one turn at a time… At the start of each turn, you’ll be given a choice of “cards” each of which represents a building that you can place in your terraforming project.
You’ll then get to place any buildings (if you have available resources) and explore nearby locations. before skipping to the next turn as the day ends.
When exploring a location, you select the area on the map, with a vague description of what resources are likely to be found, some areas are suitable for building, others better for mining and each exploration will reward you with a small number of those resources.
Some resources such as nitrates and silicates will be used for building, while food, water and energy are more likely to be used by inhabitants and specific buildings.

It’s not always easy to keep on top of the resources, but soon enough you’ll be given a landing pad, which will allow you to set up a trade route, this will let you send off a resource you have plenty of, in return for something else, it’s a great way making sure you don’t end up with too much surplus, and while you’ll need a few trade-lines set up to really benefit, you can always be sure building that specific building isn’t too far away.

As you continue to expand your colony, you’ll start to balance your population, with habitable buildings for people, farms to create food, and stations to create energy, combined with consistently exploring new areas to inhabit and mine, the aim is to start looking towards establishing not just your colony with scientific buildings capable of creating a healthy atmosphere and raising water levels to make the planet a little more friendly.

One downside of increasing your colony is the increase of your population and as you get more inhabitants, their demands and expectations increase as well, so while building up service points early-on is pretty straightforward, it’s a little tougher when your inhabitants get a little more demanding.
It adds an extra layer of depth as you progress, so even when things might start off really well, you can soon find yourself struggling if you’re not taking each aspect into consideration.

The core gameplay is pretty simple, select a card (building) and which location it’ll be placed, maximise your resources, and then use one of your leaders powers to explore an area or perform actions such as gaining extra resource points.

But there’s a definite depth, some buildings will have a negative effect if placed next to housing, or a positive effect if next to certain structures, and will you clear rocks from the landscape to make more room, or keep them in place for a few extra resource buffs.

All in all, there’s plenty to test your intergalactic brains, but at the same time it could have been presented a little better, while your cards, leaders and options will vary between playthroughs, it always looks very similar, as you’ll see from the screenshots, it’s pretty straight forward, bigger and more successful colonies get some extra visual bells and whistles, but generally it’s looks and sounds as familiar as the core gameplay – choose a space, plonk down the building, explore, end turn, rinse and repeat, but thankfully in play, things feel pretty different, especially when you start exploring other scenarios and progressing further into your lifetime of the game with some roguelike options.

Trying to merge a turn-based colony management with deck-building isn’t an easy feat, and while I’d personally prefer to sink hours into a full-n deck-builder game like Neoverse or Monster Train, or go deeper with a 4X game like Age of Wonders or Civilisation, there’s definitely space in the middle for something that gives you the more strategic approach of a 4X game, with an emphasis on explore and expand, without the hassles of exploitation or extermination.
Adding the deck-playing side makes things a little easier to manage overall, without moving too far towards an actual deck-building game.

It’s fair to say the colonisation of Mars isn’t a new area to explore, but it’s ventured into with a completely fresh approach, it’s incredibly difficult to put into words, but as long as you have an interest in a strategic, turn-based stance on colonising a distant planet and head into it with an open mind, you’re likely to find a unique and enjoyable game that’s far deeper than your first impressions.

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