Somebody I read compared this unfavorably to Race for the Galaxy’s engine building crossed with area control, and honestly, yeah, that’s a fair description and also exactly why I like it. You draft project cards, build out a personal tech tree of production multipliers, and watch your little Mars-terraforming machine start clicking into gear around round four or five, the turn where three cards you’ve been holding suddenly combo off each other and your oxygen and heat production both jump at once. That’s the moment the whole game is chasing, and when it lands it’s genuinely great.
I need to talk about the insert because it’s become a small obsession of mine across every box I own, and this one is a real letdown, thin cardboard, board that won’t lay flat after a few plays, and I’ve had a copy arrive with the insert already torn. For a seventy dollar box that’s not nothing. The card art is inconsistent too, real photos mixed with clip art mixed with genuinely good illustration, like three separate design teams never compared notes, which somebody else noticed as well and I can’t unsee it now.
The multiplayer-solitaire complaint is real and I won’t pretend otherwise, interaction is mostly limited to a few take-that cards and fighting over shared milestones, most of your turn is optimizing your own tableau without much regard for anyone else’s. That’s not automatically bad, I like a good parallel-solitaire engine builder some nights, but don’t go in expecting a negotiation game. Teachability is decent once you strip the corporate era rules for a first game, though the full rulebook is genuinely intimidating for a new player left to parse it alone.