Tharsis
I’m not sure I would have been prepared for this game if I’d never played FTL. It was one of the first rougelike-like/permadeath games I’d played, and after numerous attempts I came to understand that the point wasn’t the destination, it was the journey. Even if I failed to complete a run of the game, I could still have a good time. That concept is pretty important for Tharsis, especially when you’re first starting out.
As a crew en route to Mars, you encounter catastrophe, having part of your spaceship blown apart, and two members of your crew killed instantly. From this point on it’s a battle to keep the ship (and crew) in working condition until you can reach Mars. Every week new issues arise in the ship that you will have to deal with, while ensuring your crew has enough food and health to survive.
Mechanically this is achieved by rolling dice. Each crew member will have some number of dice, replenished by eating food. These dice will most often be assigned to repairing rooms of the ship when events occur. They can also be assigned to special abilities that each crew member and room of the ship has. These range from healing crew members, to allowing the crew to move through damaged areas of the ship without taking any damage themselves.
The game is laid out like a board game. It’s a bit to take in at first, but once you get a grasp on everything you really come to appreciate the amount of streamlining that is going on. Even the controls are set up in such a way that different groups of buttons relate to specific parts of the game, allowing turns to progress very quickly without making you jump back and forth between menus to be able to do what you want to do.
Your first few games of this will almost certainly end in disaster. Maybe even more than your first few. A lot of reviews seem to be put off by the seemingly unfair nature of the game, where a single bad dice roll can potentially be run-ending, but the more familiar you become with the game’s mechanics, the less this is an issue.
The key to this game is planning, and leaving yourself options for when you do get a bad dice roll. Every single option is incredibly important, from the order that you crew takes their turns, to when you hold dice compared to when you use them, to when you invest dice into research and when you refresh your research options. Even the order in which you add dice to your research pool is important.
Once you understand this and take your time to plan out practically the entire round before it happens, including different options for when things inevitably don’t go your way, winning the game becomes a lot more achievable. I’ve had many successful attempts where I’ve made it to Mars with all of my crew still alive, but none of these happened until I’d played around with all of the game’s different systems through a bunch of failed attempts. In the end, now that I’ve put the time in to learn it, I’ve ended up with a game that I find challenging, but balanced, and fun regardless of whether or not I do end up at Mars.
