Dave Reviews: Terraforming Politics

Terraforming Mars: Turmoil

Is Terraforming Mars not complicated enough for you? Welcome to the "biggest & most strategic expansion" for the game, according to its Kickstarter. And according to me. I can verify that it is, shall we say, hearty.

But is that good?

If you look at the box art, with the shiny white room and the dozens of representatives listening to some guy with more charisma than brains flail about and yell, you could be forgiven for thinking, "Where the hell is this supposed to happen? It takes forever to get a city built here." The way I think about it is that, as opposed to Douglas Adams' theory, this is really what happens to middle managers—they get fired into space to act as delegates whose only role is to get bought off by giant corporations.

Because that is, basically, what Turmoil is about. There's a new system of factions, one of which rules each generation. The ruling faction is determined by who has the most delegates, and gives certain bonuses to actions performed during their round in charge. Non-aligned delegates are added to the terraforming committee depending on which global events are drawn or occur, but for the most part delegates come from the players—each player gets one delegate they can place for free as an action (the cost of doing business), and they can purchase more if they want.

Being the first to support a faction gives you the party leader; being the party leader of the faction when they come to power gives you the chairman as well. Having the chairman gives you influence, as does having the party leader and additional delegates in the dominant party (whoever has the most members, which is not the same as the ruling party... politics are complicated). Influence helps you gain extra beneficial effects, or avoid catastrophic effects, from the global events that occur. You see the events coming a couple turns in advance, giving you a chance to plan, but even if no one tries to stop you from buying extra influence, it's not necessarily cheap to gain high influence quickly.

A more cost-effective way to gain influence is to take the party leadership of a faction and then funnel your free delegates into the same faction, which will eventually become dominant. However, if that faction is unlikely to be dominant on a given turn, you need to make sure there's no effect you want your influence to enhance or mitigate in the coming event.

What you'll also find is that, because TM is a game that allows unlimited actions as long as you have them available, the political aspect puts a greater emphasis on having high monetary income. Not only does more money coming in let you buy politicians, the expansion makes your Terraforming Rating drop by one every turn. Thus, everyone is looking for ways to mitigate the income loss, and income boosts are more beneficial in a relative sense than in the base game. In the base game, it was at least theoretically possible to have a level of income that made it so you had a hard time spending all that money; now it's just not going to happen, because you have less money and all these politicians that you can spend it on.

The Kickstarter says this is an expert expansion. That is absolutely correct. However, not only is that true, it's an expansion where you really need to have the rules as understood as possible when you start playing, because trying to figure it out on the fly takes time. The base TM is supposed to be about a two hour game; our first attempt at the expansion, with five players (two new to TM), went four hours without coming close to completion. The snowball effects that carry through to the end were just about to hit, but it still would have taken at least five hours start to finish.

For all that, we still had fun, so if you have an open night with no real concern for game length, go for it. But much of that fun had to do with the fact that Terraforming Mars is a very good game on a base level. This expansion changes the game in a way that some people will find refreshing, but it's really just more involved without being much better or worse.

Score: Twenty-seven purchased delegate seats out of thirty-six.