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The year is 2179, and Earth's future seems bleak. Years of pollution have tarnished the landscape, and the world's supplies of natural resources have dwindled to abysmal levels.The use of electric vehicles, solar technologies, and other energy-saving solutions have slowed the problem, but the long-term abuse on the planet by previous generations has been hard to reverse. Most Earthlings seem to have given up hope, yet a group of optimistic explorers are trekking to Mars, which some believe may turn around their fate.
In search of knowledge, these explorers hope that understanding the demise of alien populations can assist them with preventing or at least slowing the rapid deterioration of Earth. They'll need to replicate Martian technologies, translate their languages, and avoid gaining too much radiation along the way in order to end up with the most prestige and save Earth as they know it.
In Ruins of Mars, players compete to build out their arsenal of knowledge, attempting to understand the languages of ancient civilizations that colonized Mars and made it a hub of economic activity. The game is played around a board with five locations and eleven communal action tiles that are laid out at random underneath the board as evenly as possible.
On a turn, you choose one of the locations, optionally pay to shift an action tile from an adjacent location to the active one, take the action of the location — the effect of which will be based on the tiles below that space — optionally replicate alien tech by paying resources and adding it to your board for personal use, then reallocate the action tiles from the active site in a mancala-like fashion.
Over the course of the game, you learn the Martian languages and re-discover and study their technologies, which come in three levels and multiple classifications and which grant you special abilities. Along the way, you might pick up radiation from various actions, and you'll want to ditch that if possible so as not to lose points in the final scoring, which is mostly based on the tech you've assembled and your skill with languages.
- Easy to learn but hard to master.
- Quick gameplay.
- Excellent value for $29.
- Well-organized player information on the board.
- Strategic depth.
- Seamless gameplay once learned.
- Can be strategically punishing if opponents set up actions too high.
- Player made a strategic error by not paying attention to the opponent finishing their tech track.
- Finding ancient and lost languages and ruins on Mars, possibly after a failed terraforming.
- Mars
- Terraforming Mars
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- action selection — A rondel action selection type mechanic is used.
- End-game trigger — The game end is triggered when a player fills up their tech track or when three languages are discovered.
- Resource Management — Players gather resources like fuel, parts, plans, and oxygen to perform actions and buy technologies.
- Rondel — A rondel action selection type mechanic is used.
- Set Collection — Collecting sets of technologies for points at the end of the game.
- Technology Tree/Market — Players can buy technologies from a technology tree to enhance their abilities or score points.
- Variable player powers — Each player has a character ability, like the Doctor or the Trader, that grants them special abilities.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- October is incredibly busy so we have a couple of more we have three many games a week for the rest of the month pretty much.
- This is a rondelle action selection type monk collar game.
- The radiations gonna kill you but in this game it gives you negative you see that one a tipping point where radiation you have at the end of the game unless you have the most agood the most it's negative to entry point to radiation yeah.
- You literally can play this entire game from everything you see on the table you don't even need the rule book.
- This player aid tells you every step of the game and tells you when things happen and how to score the game.
- It should it should be way more.
- The strategy to this game is making sure that you're not stacking those actions that high for your opponents.
- It is so thinking, it is far far more strategic than you would think just looking at it.
- I love games that are easy to learn but hard to master.
- This game is really good.
- It's so quick and this is a no-brainer for $29 people seriously.
References (from this video)
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Anacrony is a cooperative game for one to four players. So it's a cooperative game where you're working together to stop that end game timer.
- You're constantly making choices about how you're gonna spend your next X turns, and you've got to have enough resources.
- You've got to plan for months ahead. You've got to plan how you're gonna spend your next X turns.
- This is a really good cooperative game. I've played it a couple of times.
- It's a very thinky game. So you've got all these different tracks and your different workers and your different ways to score points.