Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
The Game Components
Terra Prime comes in an attractive bookshelf box with the following components:
Command Ship Boards: These are full-color linen-textured cardstock boards--and thus a bit thinner than your average cardboard pieces--which each show a player's ship. Each board has spaces for loading cargo and adding ship components; in addition, the ship board details a lot of the rules for each player, reminding them of costs for various modules, turn order, how alien attacks work, and more.
The artwork is slightly cartoony, but attractive. There's also been good use made of a few different icons, to denote weapons, cargo, thrusters, and shields. Both of these elements carry across the entire game.
I should also note that I've seen various players that don't like the cardstock thickness of these game elements. I think they're fine, but caveat reader.
Cardboard Bits: There are tons and tons of cardboard bits in this game, all published on linen-textured cardboard. These include the 27 hexes (plus 1 outpost) that make up the game board, the 14 tech upgrades, the 18 demand tiles, the 43 ship modules, the 20 reward tiles, and piles of credit chips and victory (Leadership) point markers.
They're all well-designed and attractive and generally have good usability. For example, the outpost tile also reminds you of cargo delivery fees and colonization rewards, while handy icons make it easy to see what most of the tiles do (though a few are a bit more obscure).
There are, unfortunately, two missteps among the cardboard bits.
The biggest problem is that green and blue resources were hard to distinguish on the tech and demand tiles until you looked at them closely. (Fortunately there's some extreme consistency in the tile designs, and thus I quickly learned that when blue and green cubes were shown on the same tile, blue always appeared to the left of green, which made it easier for me to distinguish the two similar colors from afar.)
The other problem is that registration and die-cutting were flawed on some of the tiles. As with the production of Homesteaders, I had problems punching out the star-shaped victory points. Though I could see the registration was off-centered for some hexes and circles, I think I only had one bit in the whole set where it was off sufficiently to really affect the bit. So, overall, these printing issues turned out to be not that troublesome in this game, but I still feel compelled to at least mention them.
(I should also mention that my review copy of Terra Prime was one of the first ones printed, so I can't speak as to whether the printing problems improved as the print run went on.)
Wooden Bits: There are a bunch of brown, green, blue, and yellow wooden resource cubes (plus some pink plastic cubes for energy). Some red wooden discs also help to keep track of game end. They're all pretty standard.
More notable are the player bits. Each player gets a very cute 2-D rocket in their color (orange, purple, white, teal, or gray), plus eight colony markers, which are each half-cylinders. I love wooden bits with character, and these have them.
Dice: A set of four red plastic dice.
Rules: A 12-page rule book, attractively printed in full-color, featuring lots of illustrations and some examples. It was pretty easy to learn the game from them.
Overall, the components for Terra Prime are attractive and well produced--minus some manufacturing qualms. Their biggest asset, however, is that a considerable amount of good work has gone toward making these bits easy to use, thanks to extensive use of icons and inclusion of rules on the game board. As such Terra Prime earns a strong "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Terra Prime is to earn the most victory points through the founding of colonies, delivery of goods, and destruction of marauding aliens.
Setup: The board is laid out for exploration, with 5 green tiles, 7 yellow tiles, and 9 red tiles arranged in ever-growing distances from the Terra Prime Outpost.
Each player gets a plain rocket ship and starts out on the Terra Prime Outpost.
Order of Play: Players take turns one at a time, each taking the following two steps:
- Produce Resources.
- Perform Actions.
Perform Actions: Then the active player takes his actions. At start, each player will get three, although you can take more if you have more thrusters on your ship. I've broken down actions into three categories, below, based on where you can do them.
Standard Actions: Many actions can be down anywhere on the board.
Move or Explore. Ships move along the edges of tiles, from one vertex to another. You can move along one edge for one action. If you move to a vertex where one of the hexes adjacent to that vertex is face-down, you turn it up, revealing the tile to everyone.
You do, however, get to orient the tile as you see fit--which lets you decide which vertices get planets and/or asteroid belts (though there are restrictions as to where planets can be placed), and which is also a pretty big advantage for initially exploring a tile.
(Here's a catch: you can only explore a new tile once per turn.)
However, some tiles can be dangerous. If a tile has asteroids in the middle, they might hit you (the person that initially reveals them). Further any time you land at a vertex with asteroids or take any action alongside any tile with aliens in the middle, your ship could get hurt.
(Basically, asteroids have a 2/3rd chance of hitting you, tough aliens always hit you at least once, and puny aliens have a 1/2 chance of hitting you. Getting hit can remove shield energy, upgraded ship modules, or even cost you victory points.)
Exploring the dangerous "red" tiles automatically earns you victory points, so that's something for your trouble ... However, most of those tiles have lots of aliens.
Short-Range Scan. So, you might not always want to rush straight into an unrevealed tile, eh? You can take an action to look at an adjacent, face-down tile.
Colonize. If you have a colony aboard, you can place it on a planet or asteroid belt that hasn't already been colonized. The color of planet determines what resources can be collected there and what modules may be built, as noted in the "colony actions", below.
This also gives you a reward tile, which typically gives a resource or a ship module. Finally, colonization also earns you points, with that point total usually increasing as colonies are placed further from Terra Prime.
Fight Aliens. You can fight aliens with your guns. The more guns you have, the more likely you hurt them. After you fire, they respond if they're still alive.
Each alien killed earns you 2 Victory Points. In addition, if you kill all the aliens in a hex, they're gone forever and you earn a reward tile.
Pacify Aliens. Alternatively, you can pacify aliens by giving them resources. This also makes them go away forever and earns you a reward tile (but not victory points!).
Colony Actions: Some actions can only be taken at colonies. You can use anyone's colonies, but if they're not yours, the owner earns 1 victory point.
Collect Resources. If a resource is sitting at the colony, you can take it.
Charge Shields. if it was a red colony, you may instead fill up all your shields to max power for 10 credits.
Install a Module. You can increase the weapons (fight better), cargo (carry more), thruster (take more actions), and shields (protect better) of your ship for a small cost in credits. Each upgrade may only be done at a certain color of colony.
Teleport Home. From a red planet you can move your ship directly to the Terra Prime outpost.
Offload a Colony. if you want to ditch a colony marker, you can only do so at a colony. It doesn't cost an action, but the colony owner (if not you) does earn 1 VP.
Terra Prime Actions: Finally, a few last actions can be taken at Terra Prime:
Take Red Actions. You can build shield modules or charge shields just like at a red planet.
Deliver Resources. There are always three demand tiles out, saying what resources are currently sought. You can deliver green, blue, or yellow resources to earn money from these demands. In addition, if you complete a demand (for, for example, two green and two blue), you earn victory points.
Buy Tech Upgrades. You can alternatively turn in certain resources for technology upgrades. They can improve cargo, movement, actions, or fighting. These techs form the basis of a few different strategies in the game (exploration, colonization, combat, and/or trading).
Load Colony Marker. You can only pick up new colony markers at Terra Prime. They take up two adjacent cargo bays.
Use Satellite Scanner. From Terra Prime, you can look at any two face-down tiles as one action.
Ending the Game: The game ends after either most of the reward tiles are revealed or else when most of the demand tiles have been satisfied. Players get a few extra victory points for money, resources, and unused colonies. The player with the most points (from colonization, colony use, alien ship destruction, red hex exploration, demand tiles, and final points) wins the game.
Relationships to Other Games
Terra Prime looks to me very much like a game that started out as a way to improve The Starfarers of Catan. You similarly have a universe made of hexes, traveled by ships with cannons and rockets, discovering resource-producing planets which are (generally) separated from each other by two hex vertices. However, I note that primarily as a point of historical interest; Terra Prime is very much its own game, though its does share the resource management and exploration aspects of the Starfarers.
Terra Prime is also one of the two games released as part of Tasty Minstrel Games' roll-out. The other was the excellent Homesteaders, which the author of Terra Prime also did development work for.
The Game Design
Overall, Terra Prime is a thoughtful game of strategic management.
At core, it's got solid strategic mechanisms, as you figure out what you need (for demands or to get technology), then where you're going to get it from. As already noted, you can build these strategies around multiple paths to victory, among them building colonies, fighting aliens, and shipping goods.
That's modified by some risk-reward mechanisms. The most notable of them is, of course, deciding whether to look at hexes before you enter them. However, there's also real risk-reward in figuring out which on-board resources you want to depend on. Your resources are always going to be available to you, but if you want to use something from someone else, you have to figure out whether another player is likely to grab it first. This risk-reward is also mirrored by some randomness, not just in other peoples' actions, but in the combat and hex revelation results.
Individual players can usually suss out whether an element of randomness is something they're looking for in games. I'll simply note here that it exists.
I also quite like the mechanism whereby you can use other peoples' colonies in exchange for them earning victory points. It's certainly been soon before, in games like Caylus, but it always seems to do a good job of increasing the interactivity of a game.
I will warn that there's definitely opportunity to mess yourself up in this game: a little bit from managing your turns wrong (especially at the start, when things are a little more fragile because so few tiles are turned up), but also from taking risks that don't pan out. This isn't necessarily a detriment, but I think it does result in the game trending more toward gamers than families (something that I think is also underlined by its overall complexity).
My only real concern with the game was that it ran long for what it is. I think that things would speed up through additional play.
Overall, I think Terra Prime is a good release that'll particularly be enjoyed by people unhappy with the dearth of science-fiction oriented German-style games. I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance: good.
Conclusion
Terra Prime is a science-fiction-themed game of exploration, combat, and commerce. It's got some solid German mechanics, but also an element of randomness that's more in tune wit American preferences. I think it'll appeal most to serious gamers who don't mind luck playing a roll (sic) in their games.
