

To be honest, the chances are once you have played with the Prelude expansion you’ll always play with it. This is so you can take them out again if you don’t want to play this expansion.

Each player then has a choice to play one or the other, discarding the unwanted one.Įach card is marked with a symbol to indicate they are Prelude expansion cards. Instead deal 1 base Corporate card and 1 Prelude Corporate card to each player. In this variant you don’t shuffle the Corporate cards into the base game. If you want to make sure players have an option to play one of the Prelude Corporate cards then there is a nice variant. The Corporation and Project cards are shuffled into their respective decks to be included in the game. Let’s take a look at the Terraforming Mars Prelude expansion contents: There are also 5 new corporations that will be fun to play. Prelude’s main benefit is that it gives players a boost at the beginning with Prelude cards to help production and income. As the game title suggests this expansion mainly modifies the start of the game. Preludeīy far the best Terraforming Mars expansion pack, Prelude seeks to improve the starting phase of the game. When the three global parameters have all reached their goal, the terraforming is complete, and the game ends after that generation.Let’s take a look at the first expansion and the one I recommend you buy – Prelude. The turn continues around the table (sometimes several laps) until all players have passed.Ĥ) Production phase: Players get resources according to their terraform rating and production parameters. Each round is called a generation (guess why) and consists of the following phases:Ģ) Research phase: All players buy cards from four privately drawn.ģ) Action phase: Players take turns doing 1-2 actions from these options: Playing a card, claiming a Milestone, funding an Award, using a Standard project, converting plant into greenery tiles, converting heat into a temperature raise, and using the action of a card in play. You also compete for different Milestones and Awards worth many VPs. On the game board, you compete for the best places for your city tiles, ocean tiles, and greenery tiles. However, your income is complemented with your production, and you also get VPs from many other sources.Įach player keeps track of their production and resources on their player boards, and the game uses six types of resources: MegaCredits, Steel, Titanium, Plants, Energy, and Heat. Your basic income, as well as your basic score, is based on your Terraform Rating (starting at 20), which increases every time you raise one of the three global parameters. Standard Projects are always available to complement your cards. Buying cards is costly, so there is a balance between buying cards (3 megacredits per card) and actually playing them (which can cost anything between 0 to 41 megacredits, depending on the project). Many cards also have requirements and they become playable when the temperature, oxygen, or ocean coverage increases enough. The cards can give you immediate bonuses, as well as increasing your production of different resources. The projects (cards) can represent anything from introducing plant life or animals, hurling asteroids at the surface, building cities, to mining the moons of Jupiter and establishing greenhouse gas industries to heat up the atmosphere. The players acquire unique project cards (from over two hundred different ones) by buying them to their hand. In Terraforming Mars, you play one of those corporations and work together in the terraforming process, but compete for getting victory points that are awarded not only for your contribution to the terraforming, but also for advancing human infrastructure throughout the solar system, and doing other commendable things.


Giant corporations, sponsored by the World Government on Earth, initiate huge projects to raise the temperature, the oxygen level, and the ocean coverage until the environment is habitable. In the 2400s, mankind begins to terraform the planet Mars.
