On Mars

This is a typical Vital Lacerda game - relatively simple actions on your turn but it is how those actions interact that drive the depth, complexity and difficulty in learning the game. Those actions also have a strong link to the theme. Not a game for everyone as it is heavy and you need to invest a lot of time to understand how everything fits together before you can even start to play well but, if you like that sort of thing, I suspect this one will be a good one.

Fantastic production quality, loads of lovely wooden bits, great artwork, huge table presence.

Thematic and clever mechaisms. But overall for us the plethora of fiddly rules, the over complication in the game play and dozens of hard to discern and hard to distinguish icons sucked the fun out of it.

It took 1.75 hours for setup and the guy who'd played before to explain the rules. In his prior game he admitted they'd played with several rules wrong. Despite that we managed to play with a different rule wrong which we noticed at the end.

All three players on more than one occasion each had the experience of working towards a rewarding move, then selecting the action, paying the resources, putting the workers in the rest room, taking the card or placing the tile only for someone else to say "You can't do that, because..."

"...there isn't a matching tech chit somewhere on anyone's player board that has been moved sufficiently far right" or "...that's not the icon you think it is" or "...you haven't built enough shelters to qualify you to store that many resources" etc

We've played the Gallerist, Vinhos, CO2, Kanban and Lisboa and didn't have the same trouble, so it's not that we're not familiar with Vital's style. It's just that this one's too much for us.

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Another Lacerda classic and in my opinion his most thematic and engaging title yet.

Kickstarter

Love the art and mechanisms in this game.