How to play Terraforming Mars

Terraforming Mars is a card-driven engine-builder by Jacob Fryxelius in which each player represents a corporation pouring resources into making the red planet habitable. Over a series of generations you raise the temperature, fill the oceans, and enrich the atmosphere — each improvement nudging your Terraform Rating upward and bringing the end of the game one step closer.

The depth lives in the project cards. Hundreds of them let you build power plants, seed forests, herd animals, and engineer asteroids — each one unlocking synergies with the cards already in front of you. Managing the tension between spending now to build your engine and spending now to raise parameters (and thus your income) is the central puzzle of every session.

Never played an engine builder? The loop is simpler than the table full of cubes suggests: each generation you buy a few cards, play the ones you can afford, and nudge your production tracks upward so the next generation pays you more. Every global parameter you push up also raises your Terraform Rating, and your TR is your base income — terraforming literally pays. The first generations feel poor for everyone; that's normal. The engine you assemble in the first hour funds the terraforming you do in the second.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 1 game board — a hex map of Mars' Tharsis region where ocean, greenery, and city tiles land, ringed by the combined Terraform Rating / victory point track. It also carries the temperature and oxygen tracks, the six standard projects, and the five milestones and five awards everyone races for.
• 5 player boards — your economy dashboard: cubes in the six boxes (megacredits, steel, titanium, plants, energy, heat) are resources you can spend now; player markers on the numbered tracks show your production — what the board pays you every production phase.
• 208 project cards — the engine parts. Green automated cards fire once when played; blue active cards carry ongoing effects or actions usable once per generation; red events resolve and flip face-down. Cards bearing the small red-and-white icon belong to the Corporate Era variant and are removed for the standard game.
• 17 corporation cards — your identity: starting megacredits, starting production, and a unique power. Ten standard corporations, two Corporate Era ones, and five Beginner Corporations that simplify first games (42 M€ and you keep all 10 dealt cards for free).
• 8 reference cards — action and phase summaries to pass around the table.
• 9 ocean tiles — stacked on the board's reserved area. Placing one raises your TR, and every ocean already on the board pays 2 M€ to anyone who later places a tile beside it. All 9 on the map completes one of the three global goals.
• Greenery, city, and special tiles — greeneries raise oxygen (and your TR) when placed and are worth 1 VP each plus 1 VP to every adjacent city; cities score 1 VP per adjacent greenery at game end; special tiles come from specific cards, which explain their own rules.
• 200 resource cubes (bronze = 1, silver = 5, gold = 10) — a shared denomination system: the same cubes are megacredits in one box, animals or microbes on a card.
• 200 player markers (transparent cubes in 5 colors) — mark your TR, your production levels, ownership of tiles, and which blue-card actions you have already used this generation.
• 3 white board markers — the game's clock: temperature, oxygen, and the generation counter.
• 1 first player marker — shifts one seat clockwise each generation.

The game is played over generations, each with four phases:

1. Player order — pass the first player marker one seat clockwise and advance the generation marker. (Skipped in the first generation.)
2. Research — each player draws 4 project cards and may buy any of them for 3 M€ each; the rest are discarded face-down. There is no hand limit, but every kept card costs. (Also skipped in the first generation.)
3. Actions — in turn order, each player takes 1 or 2 actions in any combination, then play passes on; keep circling the table until everyone has passed. Taking no action at all means you pass and are out for the rest of the generation. The seven actions: - Play a project card — check its requirement (say, oxygen at 9% or higher), pay its cost, resolve its effects. Steel helps pay for building-tag cards at 2 M€ per cube; titanium pays for space-tag cards at 3 M€. - Use a standard project — always available on the board: sell patents (discard cards for 1 M€ each), power plant (11 M€, +1 energy production), asteroid (14 M€, +1 temperature), aquifer (18 M€, place an ocean), greenery (23 M€), city (25 M€, +1 M€ production). - Claim a milestone — pay 8 M€ to bank 5 end-game VP if you meet its condition (Terraformer TR 35, Mayor 3 cities, Gardener 3 greeneries, Builder 8 building tags, Planner 16 cards in hand). Only 3 of the 5 may ever be claimed — it is a race. - Fund an award — 8 M€ for the first funded, 14 for the second, 20 for the third and last. At game end each funded award pays whoever leads its category, funder or not. - Use a blue-card action — once per generation each; mark it with a player marker. - Convert 8 plants into a greenery tile (raising oxygen and your TR), or convert 8 heat into +1 temperature.
4. Production — everyone simultaneously: first all leftover energy slides into heat, then you collect megacredits equal to TR + M€ production and every other resource per its track. Clear the markers off used blue cards, and the next generation begins.

A round in practice. Ana takes her two actions: she pays 14 M€ for the Asteroid standard project — the temperature rises a step and her TR ticks up with it — then plays a green card from hand, paying part of its cost in steel thanks to its building tag. Beto converts 8 plants into a greenery beside his city: oxygen up, TR up, and the tile will score twice at the end. Carla, already owning three city tiles, spends 8 M€ to claim the Mayor milestone before anyone else can. Diego takes a single action — his blue card's once-per-generation action — to keep his options open; a few turns later, with nothing left worth doing, he passes. When the last player passes, production pays out: leftover energy becomes heat, and Diego collects megacredits equal to his TR plus his M€ production.

The planet itself ends the game: when all three global parameters — temperature (+8 °C), oxygen (14%), and all 9 oceans — have reached their goals, the game ends at the end of that generation, after its production phase. Everyone then gets one last chance, in player order, to convert plants into greenery tiles before scoring. Then total:

• Terraform Rating — your marker's value is your base score.
• Awards — each funded award pays 5 VP to its category leader and 2 VP to the runner-up (no runner-up prize in a 2-player game; ties are friendly — everyone tied gets the full value).
• Milestones — 5 VP for each one you claimed.
• Board tiles — 1 VP per greenery tile you own, and every city tile scores 1 VP per adjacent greenery regardless of who owns the greenery.
• Cards — VP icons on your played cards, including cards that score per resource collected on them, like animals and microbes.

The highest total wins; ties go to the most megacredits. Keep one strategic truth front of mind: your Terraform Rating is simultaneously your per-generation income and your base end-game score, so every parameter you raise pays you twice — once now, once at final scoring.