Ares Expedition: Red Planet, Red Cards, Redefining Strategy

April 30th, 2023

As I continue to expand my repertoire of games I’ve played (both board and video), I am constantly honing in on the features that push games into my list of favorites. Over the years I’ve certainly narrowed in on a few key aspects; deck/tableau/engine-building games, for example, are firmly at the forefront of games that scratch my optimization itch. Co-op modes, as well as games that minimize randomness and allow for “optimal” strategies have slowly overtaken my collection as well. While games like Slay the Spire and Dominion will forever hold a high position in my overall list, my current leader is Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition - especially with the newly released Crisis Expansion.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is a card-based game that follows all of the core tenets of Terraforming Mars - players are astronauts tasked with the mission of altering Mars into a habitable planet. While the original game had elements of private drafting and tile placement, Ares Expedition relies solely on the cards that are drawn and the engines that players end up building. It also introduces the mechanic of phase selection; each turn, each player chooses one of five phases. While all players get to perform the all phases that have been selected, each player also gets a bonus for the phase that they personally selected. This drives a balance of metagaming that I’m a massive fan of - my phase selection can also take into account the phases that others are most likely to play, allowing me to capitalize on other aspects of the game.

Ares Expedition is solely a card/engine building game; while that’s really the only mechanic that drives scores up, there are so many different routes to victory. Driving up production (green cards) as high as possible to rest on the laurels of the Production phase, focusing on powerful single-time actions (red cards), or relying on the slow build of repeatable actions (blue cards) are all valid - structured correctly, there’s countless combinations and ways to succeed.

Example Winning Strategy

In early 2023, Stronghold Games (the creators of Terraforming Mars games) released the Crisis expansion for Ares Expedition, a co-op specific mode that enhanced the original game. I was thrilled to try out the new mode, though reading through the rules I was a little timid. Ares Expedition included the following phrase in the rules:

“Communication: You are allowed to talk about anything.”

In all of the co-op games I’ve played, I haven’t seen a game be this blatant with the co-op mechanics. Full information was available to all players, and the strategizing was more about playing from multiple sides at once. Some games hold certain information secret, causing players to have to react and adjust their strategies on the fly (think Gloomhaven’s initiative order). Other games have enough randomness that sharing information doesn’t really achieve much anyway (Aeon’s End randomized turns, for example). Ares Expedition: Crisis mode, however, is almost as pure of a co-op game as it could be.

My friends and I have played several rounds, slowly increasing the difficulty to a point where we’re winning about half of the time. I’ve played over 100 hours by myself, and the replayability continues to be exciting. It may not be for everyone, but the knowledge that most of the losses are simply from my inability to optimize the cards that I drew is somewhat comforting. The game isn’t unfair - it’s more of an inward look at my own optimization abilities. And that’s something that I am a massive fan of.

I’m sure as more games come out my list will adjust, and there will inevitably be a game that takes up more of my time in the coming years (Gloomhaven is certainly making a push). But until then, Ares Expedition firmly sits at the top of the stack, always pulling me back for one more chance to save that red planet a final time.