Terraformers

Terraformers is an economic strategy with card game elements, tasking us with terraforming Mars. It was developed by Asteroid Lab and co-published by Goblinz Publishing and IndieArk.

Plot

Terraformers is set in an optimistic vision of the future, in which humanity not only is able to send manned missions to Mars but has also begun to terraform the Red Planet. We play as a manager of one of the Mars colonies, tasked with expanding it and gradually terraforming the planet into a second home for humanity.

Mechanics

Terraformers is a turn-based game. The player must play cards corresponding to different ventures (such as constructing buildings) while trying to synergize their deck. There's no colony without people, so we must also keep the colonists satisfied - failing to meet their expectations results in a game over.

We're tasked with managing all the aspects of our colony. This includes establishing new cities in craters and lava caves, expanding already existing settlements, discovering new territory, finding natural resource deposits, extracting them and transporting them across the map. Research and developing new technologies play an important role as well.

Our duties don't end there, as the title suggests, we not only exploit Mars but also terraform it into a habitable planet. Terraformation is composed of a number of layers, such as gradually restoring geological activity by reviving volcanoes, pulling icy asteroids from space to serve as a source of water, building massive space mirrors or constructing factories emiting gases into the atmosphere (including greenhouse gases to warm up the planet).

If done correctly, our efforts should soon turn Mars into a habitable planet, on which we can even recreate Earth's ecosystem. Though the process begins modestly, with bringing in bacteria, soon enough we'll start planting forest and bringing in wildlife.

Technical aspects

Most of the gameplay of Terraformers consists of watching Mars from its orbit and browsing through various windows. From time to time the game shows us colorful, cartoonish displays of specific characters and locations.