Solo gaming offers a more chances for board gamers to play, practice, and teach. This fall we’re featuring our solo board gaming collection. This collection includes some of the most popular solo board games and our favourites. We want to help you discover them through our mini-reviews.
Terraforming Mars by Stronghold Games is the popular strategy board game where players try to make Mars habitable. The game was nominated for the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres, the best Connoisseur Board Game of the Year and became a long-lasting hit on BoardGameGeek.
The game involves deep strategy as players try to terraform the planet by acquiring and actioning contracts. These contracts help create ocean tiles, raise oxygen levels, or the planet’s temperature. They can also help players acquire more revenue or victory points. While playing competitively, you are all working together to achieve the global goals, while personally securing the most victory points.
Terraforming Mars is an excellent experience for one player. Your goals are the same, but you are limited in the generations (the number of rounds) you have to achieve them. The one player board game experience also offers tons of replayability. The game comes with a huge volume of contract/action cards. The cards you encounter each game will vary and offer players the option to use different strategies and paths to complete the global goals. This comes without drastically changing the rules and there’s no need to manage an automata while you play, either. This streamlined gameplay helps ensure that each game can be quick and immersive without losing its charm. And despite being a larger solo game, setting up/cleaning up is easy and takes only 5-10 minutes.
The story in Terraforming Mars is captivating. It helps that we were already huge fans of Kim Stanley Ronbinson’s Mars Trilogy. You can easily feel yourself in the role of corporate leader managing the evolution of the planet. The physical ocean and forest tiles that start covering the red surface with blue and green also really help the game come to life on your tabletop.
We highly recommend it if you enjoy or want something deeper for a solo game. And if you an even deeper experience, we’ve got the expansions adding more territory, corporation and project cards to the game. Pick up any three Terraforming Mars games and save 10% using code GameNightBox.