Review: Terraforming Mars – The Dice Game

Introduction & Overview

We have finally managed to build colonies on Mars, but now we face an even greater challenge: bringing the planet to life and turning it into a new home for humanity! Will your corporation be the one to lead the way?

This is how Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is presented to us, designed by Jacob Fryxelius (besides Terraforming Mars, responsible for After the Virus or Star Scrappers: Orbital). First published in 2023 by FryxGames in an English edition. The illustrations are handled by Isaac Fryxelius (Angel Fury, Brawling Barons).

It is published in Spanish by Maldito Games (the game is mostly language-independent, but some cards have a bit of text). It allows 1 to 4 players, with a suggested minimum age of 14 years and an approximate duration of about 45 minutes. The MSRP is €35. For this review, a review copy of the Spanish version by Maldito Games was used, kindly provided by the publisher.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 20×25×9 cm (a medium rectangular box similar to The White Castle but deeper), we find the following elements:

• Board (cardboard)
• 60 Dice (12 of each color) (plastic)
• 161 Cards (55×77 mm):
  • 141 Project Cards
  • 1 Base Game Card
  • 1 Corporate Era Card
  • 16 Corporation Cards
  • 2 Reference Cards
• 4 Player Markers (1 of each color) (plastic)
• 2 Global Parameter Markers (plastic)
• 4 Player Tiles (1 of each color) (cardboard)
• 11 Milestone Tiles (cardboard)
• 43 Planet Tiles (cardboard):
  • 30 Greenery/City Tiles
  • 6 Special Tiles
  • 7 Ocean Tiles
• 22 Wild Tokens (cardboard)
• Rulebook

How to Play

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is, as its name suggests, the dice version of the Fryxelius hit. Dice represent resources, featuring five types, each with three faces. On each turn, the active player must choose between taking a support action (gain a die and roll it, discard a die to set the face of another, or discard a die to draw two cards) and a main action (play cards, take another support action, or perform a standard project) or, alternatively, produce (the player may discard cards, must discard dice down to three, replenishes their hand by drawing cards up to 5, and receives all dice produced by their cards from the general supply). There are three types of cards: production, effect, and event. Each card has a cost in dice that the player must return to the supply to play it. The goal is to accumulate the most victory points when the end of the game is triggered, which happens when 2 of the 3 terraforming parameters are completed. Additionally, three milestones are set up at the beginning of the game, and the first player to meet the required condition will claim them for end-game points, plus three resource types that will bonus players depending on who paid those symbols the most times on their cards.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the star element of the game: the Dice. These represent the different types of resources players need to manage to terraform Mars. There are five types of dice, each with three symbols (a common one with 3 faces, an uncommon one with 2 faces, and a rare one with 1 face): yellow (Megacredits, Science, and Earth), green (Plants, Microbes, and Animals), blue (Energy, Water, and Oxygen), grey (Steel, Titanium, and City), and red (Heat, Event, and Nuclear). Generally, whenever a player gains a die, they must roll it to determine its symbol. The number of dice a player can hold is unlimited, though when performing a production phase, they will have a maximum number of dice they can keep (the rest must be returned to the supply).

These dice will be used to pay the cost of Project Cards. There are three types of cards: events (provide a one-time effect), automated cards (provide a production effect), and actions/effects cards (provide ongoing effects throughout the game, either passively or via actions that flip until the next production phase; cards showing actions are rotated to indicate they have been used in the current cycle, while passive effect cards always apply). The anatomy of these cards is the same for all three types: the upper banner displays the dice with the symbols required as cost to play them over a colored band indicating the card type. Below is the card title with an illustration and a symbolic representation of the effects. Optionally, they may show victory points inside a red banner indicating they are scored at the end of the game.

Players can obtain Wild Tokens during the game. These count as a die with any symbol when paying the cost of cards.

The second card type is Corporations, which embark on the venture of terraforming Mars. These corporations set the starting point for players with an initial amount of resources (dice and wild tokens) and, optionally, an effect or action. At the start of each game, players receive two of these cards and choose one to play with. The left side provides starting resources, while the right side is a recurring production area.

There is a third type of card: Bonus Cards. These cards are similar to project cards, except they are played for free upon reaching a certain amount of terraforming points. At the beginning of the game, a deck is prepared with these cards, and players can choose which card to play from this deck when they reach or pass the corresponding spaces.

Let’s move on to the Main Board (which is double-sided), featuring a view of Mars and a series of relevant tracks and spaces:

• In the center of the board, we find the Red Planet divided into a grid of hexes representing the different locations where terraforming can take place. Certain spaces reserved for oceans feature a blue-tinted background. Most spaces show an placement bonus that triggers when covered by a tile.
• Around the board is the Terraforming Rating track numbered from 0 to 50. Spaces 5 and 12 are marked, indicating the score threshold at which a player can play a bonus card.
• Along the top arc of the planet, we find the oxygen track, with spaces numbered from 0% to 16% (increasing in 2% steps). This is one of the global parameters to raise during the game. The main way to increase it is by placing greenery on Mars. Some spaces offer die bonuses.
• On the right banner, we find the temperature track, numbered from -32 ºC to +8 ºC (increasing in 4 ºC steps). This is the second global parameter to develop. Like oxygen, some spaces trigger fixed die bonuses.
• In the upper right corner, there is a space to place the ocean tile supply. This is the third global parameter to complete, with the goal of placing all ocean tiles from this stack onto the board.
• In the upper left area, there is a space to place award dice, rewarding players with the highest presence of those symbols on their cards.
• Finally, in the lower left area, we have the Milestones area, with three spaces showing 4 victory points.

When transforming the surface of Mars, players will place a series of tiles representing various elements:

• Ocean Tiles: water is essential for life and is one of the 3 global parameters to develop. By default, they can only be placed on spaces reserved for oceans.
• Greenery Tiles: greenery produces oxygen through photosynthesis. Additionally, they yield victory points based on adjacent cities.
• City Tiles: represent urban centers on Mars. When placed, they award a fixed number of points plus a variable amount depending on the number of adjacent greenery tiles.
• Special Tiles: correspond to specific cards that allow them to be placed on the board. Beyond occupying a specific space and claiming its placement bonus, they usually offer no additional benefits.

To track victory points, each player has a Player Marker in their color that moves along the score track on the main board.

Finally, let’s talk about Milestones. At the start of each game, three tiles are set up, establishing a race objective for the players. The first player to complete the required condition earns the tile, worth victory points at the end of the game.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Place the main board in the center of the table.
2. Shuffle the bonus card deck and draw twice as many cards as the number of players, placing them face down next to the board (return the rest to the box).
3. Shuffle the project card deck and place it to one side.
4. Place the 7 ocean tiles on their reserved space on the main board.
5. Place the temperature and oxygen markers on the starting space of their respective tracks.
6. Shuffle the milestone tiles and place 3 of them on the main board (return the rest to the box).
7. Form a general supply with the dice, wild tokens, greenery/city tiles, and special tiles.
8. Take one die of each color and randomly select 3 of them, roll them, and place them on the award spaces on the main board.
9. Each player chooses a color and takes a player marker (placed on the 0 space of the score track) and a tile of their color.
10. Each player draws 5 cards from the deck to form their starting hand.
11. Shuffle the corporation card deck and deal 2 to each player. Each player secretly selects one.
12. Randomly choose a starting player, who reveals their corporation and gains the indicated starting resources (then covers the left side with their player tile to avoid confusion). The remaining players do the same.
13. Finally, the starting player must give one of their starting resources to the last player.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game takes place over an indefinite number of turns taken sequentially by players, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise.

On each turn, the active player must choose to either:

• Take Actions. In this case, the player has two actions to perform in order:
  • Support Action. The player chooses one of the following:
    • Gain a die from the supply, roll it, and add it to their personal pool.
    • Discard any die from their pool to set another die in their pool to any face of their choice.
    • Discard any die from their pool to draw 2 cards.
    • Activate an Action Card with a support action effect. Rotate the card 90º; it remains tapped until the next production phase.
  • Main Action. The player chooses one of the following:
    • Take another support action (choosing again from the available choices).
    • Play a card. Return the required resources to the supply and put the card into play. If it is an event card, resolve its effect immediately.
    • Raise the Temperature. Return three heat resources (red dice showing heat) to the supply, advance the temperature by one step (gaining any step bonus), and score 2 victory points.
    • Place an Ocean. Return three water resources (blue dice showing water) to the supply, place an ocean tile on an eligible space (gaining any placement bonus), and score 2 victory points.
    • Place Greenery. Return four plant resources (green dice showing plants) to the supply, place a greenery tile on an available space (gaining any placement bonus), advance oxygen by one step (gaining any step bonus), and score 2 victory points plus 1 victory point per adjacent city.
    • Place a City. Return three city resources (grey dice showing city) to the supply, place a city tile on an available space (gaining any placement bonus), and score 2 victory points plus 1 victory point per adjacent greenery tile.
    • Buy TR/Points. Return three megacredit resources (yellow dice showing megacredits) to the supply and score 2 victory points.
    • Perform a Main Action from an Action Card. Rotate the card 90º; it remains tapped until the next production phase.
• Produce. Proceed as follows:
  1. The player may keep up to 3 resources in their personal pool, discarding any excess.
  2. The player may discard any number of cards from their hand.
  3. If the player has fewer than 5 cards in hand, draw back up to 5 cards.
  4. Gain all dice produced by production cards from the general supply (if supply runs out, take as many as available). Roll them and place them in the personal pool.
  5. Untap all used action cards.

After this, the turn passes to the player on the left.

Remember that whenever you advance global parameters (raising temperature, placing oceans, or raising oxygen), you score 2 victory points. If a parameter is already maximized, you score 1 VP instead.

Game End

The end of the game is triggered when at least two of the three global parameters (temperature, oxygen, oceans) are completed. The active player finishes their turn, and all players get one final turn (including the player who triggered the end of the game). Then, final scoring takes place, adding to the points accumulated during the game:

• Victory points on played cards.
• 4 Victory points for each completed milestone.
• 5/3 Victory points for having the most/second most corresponding symbols on played cards for each of the award dice. In case of a tie for first place, all tied players get the first-place points (and 2nd place is not awarded). In case of a tie for second place, all tied players receive 3 points.
  • In a 2-player game, second-place points are not awarded.

The player with the most points wins. In case of a tie, the player with higher die production wins. If still tied, victory is shared.

Variants

Solo Mode. The player has 50 turns to try to complete all 3 global parameters. If successful, score performance against a reference chart. A few setup adjustments apply. For awards, score 6/8/10 points depending on the rarity of the resource icon. 4 bonus cards are made available. A score marker from another player is used to track turns on the board track. Milestones expire and are removed on turns 16, 20, and 24 (from top to bottom) if unclaimed.

Personal Opinion

Today we delve into one of the pleasant surprises of 2023 (if you are one of those neat readers who waits to read the whole review before checking the final score, you’re already suffering a minor spoiler, so please forgive me). It all started with my initial indifference toward the design. I like Terraforming Mars, but back with Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (check out its tocho-review here), I felt a pang of disappointment because, while it’s a very decent game, it felt like a blatant rip-off of my beloved Race for the Galaxy (check out its tocho-review here) without quite matching its big brother’s overall feel.

Prejudicially, I assumed this Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game was going to be more of the same, so I originally had no intention of picking up a copy. However, positive word of mouth started circulating, and eventually, I took the plunge. Let’s see if those good impressions from fellow gamers resonated with me and my gaming groups. But first, as always, huge thanks to Maldito Games for kindly providing the review copy that makes this ramble possible.

In Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, we find a genuinely streamlined version of the original design. For those unfamiliar with Terraforming Mars, I recommend checking out its corresponding tocho-review. In essence, it is an engine-building card game where players must adapt the Red Planet to make it habitable by raising temperature, increasing oxygen, and building oceans for water supply. You achieve this by playing cards that cost megacredits (the main currency), alongside managing secondary resources to execute standard projects or trigger card effects.

The primary issue with Terraforming Mars is its bloated length compared to what it delivers mechanically. It’s one of those titles rarely played above two players because each generation follows a back-and-forth action structure until everyone passes, followed by a production phase. Naturally, early generations breeze by, but as engine capacity grows, the volume of actions available per generation inflates drastically.

If engine imbalances emerge, it’s not unusual to see generations where one player passes quickly while their opponent takes two or three extra turns. This uneven pacing with unpredictable downtime can be infuriating, especially with analysis paralysis prone players around. Add drafting into the mix, and round length spirals further out of control.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition attempted to solve this issue by implementing Race for the Galaxy’s simultaneous role selection. However, to achieve actual time savings, players resolve phase actions simultaneously, breeding multiplayer solitaire where player interaction boils down to role prediction mind games. Many players missed overseeing opponent moves, reintroducing pacing friction.

Fortunately, this problem has been decisively solved in Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game by shifting to an alternating turn system (instead of structured rounds), giving players full agency over when to produce. This design choice infuses the game with exceptional fluidity. Actions are crisp and self-contained, constrained cleanly by current dice pools and hand limits.

Finishing a game of Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game leaves you feeling like you made virtually the same strategic decisions as the original, but within a tight, focused timeframe. Yes, you play fewer cards, and luck plays a heavier role (drawing without a draft and rolling dice), but the experience is immensely satisfying. Turn order whips back around lightning fast; with an efficient group, games finish even faster than the box estimate.

The main drawback of this dice edition is reduced positional friction on the board map. Tile placement leans heavily on grabbing immediate space bonuses over positional tactical control, as board assets are shared rather than owned by color.

To offset this, the game introduces a neat Awards implementation replacing the original system. Originally, awards were milestone variants activated manually by paying scaling megacredits. Now, three resource types are set as awards during setup; at game end, players who spent the most of those icons on their played cards claim end-game victory point payouts.

This mechanics tweak elevates hand management decisions. Some turns you draw cards aligning seamlessly with active production and endgame awards; other turns you produce, take an action, and produce again just to flush unusable hand clutter.

Furthermore, the designer preemptively fixed another original flaw: slow openings, which required the Prelude expansion (read its tocho-review here) to patch. Most corporations now grant a generous batch of wild tokens representing flexible resources. These jumpstart player setups immediately without initial downtime. Wild token spaces on the board are naturally heavily contested.

I also appreciate the incentive to chase early points through the bonus card deck set up at the start. They function like free cards, giving an early boost that can prove vital. Hitting early bonus point thresholds grants open choice across the pool, forcing players to keep the pace instead of settling for leftover scraps.

Let’s address a few downsides. Chief among them: turns can occasionally feel unexciting. You might spend an entire turn doing two support actions just to gain dice because your hand cards don’t match your current pool. Here, RNG stings: you need a specific resource face, but support actions only grant raw dice rolls. Though you can discard a die to set a face, player instinct leans toward press-your-luck rolls over guaranteed resource sacrifice.

Another minor design miss involves resource accumulation milestones (hoarding specific colored dice). Their presence leads players to spend early turns hoarding dice purely to claim milestones, giving the starting player an unearned edge (since they choose which starting resource to pass). I personally leave these hoard-style milestones in the box, as they encourage mindless autopilot play devoid of tension. Most other milestones rely on luck or card synergies, but at least spark engaging tactical races.

The game’s brisk pacing scales exceptionally well across all player counts. While interaction is low, downtime is practically nonexistent, maintaining an engaging tempo throughout unless an AP-prone player disrupts flow.

In doing so, Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game mirrors the achievement of Bang!: The Dice Game—surpassing its original namesake design. Heavyweight fans will argue the base game offers deeper engine building (which to me often feels like padded routine), but the adage holds true: “less is more.”

This endows the title with tremendous replayability. Coupled with fast playtime, a deep card deck ensures variable experiences every session. Double-sided board maps and distinct corporation abilities guarantee long-term longevity.

Production quality is solid throughout. The custom dice have a satisfying weight, cardboard components are suitably thick and punch clean, and the linen-finish cards offer great snap (though sleeves are recommended given card-driven play). The rulebook is structured clearly without ambiguity.

Visually, the game shares the familiar graphic identity established in Ares Expedition. While not stunning, the cohesive artwork is clean, readable, and functional.

And let’s wrap this up. Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is a highly recommended design. It distills the core spirit of the original by swapping static resource tracks for tactical custom dice rolling. Its biggest triumph is replacing fixed rounds with player-driven production timing, yielding an exceptionally smooth flow. Minor quibbles aside—like occasional filler setup turns or dull hoarding milestones—it’s a thoroughly rewarding box that delivers a fantastic experience every play. Because of all this, I give it a…