Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition – Discovery · Foundations · Crisis

About this expansion

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition – Discovery · Foundations · Crisis is a 1–6 player expansion experience with a 60-minute play time, adding cooperative crises, competitive scoring, and support for larger games.

In Ares Expedition: Crisis, players continue as corporations, choosing phases and playing project cards as normal while working together to keep Mars habitable after a natural disaster. Each round, a Crisis card introduces a goal that must be completed to remove it. If a crisis remains unresolved, it lowers one or more terraforming metrics.

Players must handle each crisis as it appears and continue re-terraforming Mars. Eventually, a Crisis card can provide the opportunity to win once the planet has been re-terraformed.

• Discovery: Add awards, milestones, upgraded phase cards, and wild tags.
• Foundations: Add components for games with up to six players, plus a larger score track and the infrastructure terraforming metric.
• Crisis: Introduce escalating objectives that can reduce terraforming metrics until resolved.

Discovery’s awards are selected at the beginning of the game. At the end, the player with the most of the featured item earns 5 VP, while second place earns 2 VP. Milestones award 3 VP at the end of the game to the first player who achieves each one.

Some new cards upgrade phase cards, letting players choose between two versions with improved bonuses. Other project cards feature a wild tag: when revealed or played, its owner chooses the tag it represents for the rest of the game. Foundations also includes new projects using infrastructure and a new phase card, extending Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition for bigger groups and a broader terraforming challenge.