Managed to pick up Teraforming Mars for $50 CAD from Sunrise Records, who are doing a "All board games 35% off" sale right now (at least where I am). And I had $40 left on a gift card, so basically paid a bit over $10 out of pocket, which is the cheapest I've ever bought a board game for. They unfortunately didn't have many other games I was interested in, or didn't already own. They had a couple versions of Codenames, some Catan sets, Carcassone, and then a bunch of shitty Duck Dynasty Monopoly and Rick and Morty Guess Who, type games.
Anyway, I read through the rules last night. It doesn't sound that complicated, but it seems like it could be a pretty long game too. If the fiancee is interested, I could see setting up a two player game tonight. Anyone have any tips for playing Teraforming Mars for the first time?
Top 3 games that I play with my wife, we've been on a kick recently with it and just got on the kickstarter release too. Anyway, here are my tips:
Don't play with the beginner corps. They're stupid and you'll never play with them ever again. The actual corps give direction on how you may want to play the rest of the game based on their ability/starting resources. Otherwise, you tend to be very aimless. I would also recommend focusing/playing toward the award/milestones at first. It'll give direction on what you should be trying to accomplish.
Also, include all the cards. Again, I don't know why they decided to limit the opening cards but it's completely unnecessary. We still play with the new player rule of starting with 1 production in everything. We find the alternative just needlessly adds a turn or two to the game.
You may here recommendations to draft cards rather than just being dealt random cards. We personally don't bother with drafting, but even if you wanted to go down that route, I wouldn't recommend it for your first few games simply because you're new to all the cards anyway. You'll spend enough time reading/re-reading stuff that it's not worth the added time.
Green cards after being played can be completely covered up except for the symbols at the top (which other cards may reference). It'll help with board space/room. We also organize our blue cards in two columns, one column is "Action" cards the other are "passive" cards whose abilities are always active/on. Events are placed face own in another pile. Try to keep things tidy and re-read your blue cards often so you're remembering to trigger them.
There's a bunch more I can think of, but you can probably play a game or two and figure out the rest yourself. Again, it's not all that complicated... there's a lot of symbols and such but everything is spelled out on the card (or the book).