Ares Expedition is a reminder that sometimes the best way to revisit a classic is to distil it. Where the original Terraforming Mars sprawls (gloriously, messily) across a table, Ares Expedition tightens its grip. It keeps the heart of the experience, the slow unfurling of an ecosystem you’re nudging toward habitability, but it compresses the noise into something sharper, cleaner, and more deliberate.
What stands out first is the rhythm. Every round begins with a small act of prediction: choosing which phases the table will trigger. It’s a quiet gamble, a little psychological dance. You’re not just planning your own turn; you’re trying to read the room. Will someone else handle production for you? Will anyone dare to research this round? The game rewards boldness, but it punishes misreads just enough to keep you honest. It’s a system that makes even the simplest decision feel like a conversation.
And then the cards start to stack. Ares Expedition is a tableau builder at heart, and it leans into that identity with confidence. Projects chain into one another, engines hum to life, and suddenly you’re generating heat like a small sun or producing plants faster than you can place them. There’s a pleasure in watching your board become a machine; not a perfect one, never quite efficient enough, but something that feels uniquely yours. Every tableau tells a story of priorities: the player who rushes oceans, the one who hoards science tags, the one who quietly builds a greenery empire while everyone else is arguing about temperature.
What the game captures beautifully is the sense of momentum. Terraforming isn’t a straight line; it’s a series of lurches. A round where nothing quite works is followed by one where everything clicks and the planet leaps forward. You feel the world warming under your fingertips, the oxygen creeping up, the oceans spreading. It’s abstract, yes, but it never feels detached. The board changes because you made it change.
Ares Expedition also has a gentleness the original sometimes lacked. Turns are simultaneous, downtime is minimal, and the whole experience moves with a pace that feels respectful of your evening. It’s a game that understands you might want to terraform Mars without committing to a two‑hour negotiation with your own engine. And yet, despite the streamlining, it never feels thin. The decisions still bite. The tension still builds. The race for milestones and terraforming steps still sparks that familiar urgency.
What makes it a worthy Game of the Month is how confidently it stands on its own. It isn’t just a simplified version of the original game. It’s a reinterpretation; a different angle on the same dream. A Mars that’s a little closer, a little more immediate, a little more willing to let you get your hands dirty without drowning you in spreadsheets. It is, if we are being completely honest, better.
Ares Expedition is clever, brisk, and quietly satisfying. It gives you the feeling of building something meaningful in under an hour, and when the final oxygen cube clicks into place, you get that small, private thrill of having nudged a dead world toward life. Not bad for a deck of cards and a handful of cubes.
I totally agree! This is one of the great ones