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Review of Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium
Blurb from the publisher: 'Expand your horizons! Explore the other side of Mars!
Explore new sites and strategies in Terraforming Mars! Any of these two game boards can be used instead of the ordinary game board. They each depict a new region of Mars, with new placement bonuses, ocean areas, and brand new sets of milestones and awards.
Hellas: This map shows the south pole as well as the great Hellas sea, all the way up to the equator. Therefore, the plant bonuses lie at the top of the map, along the equator. The map overlaps the original game board by featuring Argyre Planitia and its surrounding mountains. The map features two new placement bonuses. The first, heat, is found in the Hellas sea because of the thin Martian crust in this area, as well as around the south pole where frozen carbon dioxide can be released to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. The other special bonus is on the south pole itself, requiring you to pay 6 megacredits for placing a tile here, but giving you an ocean tile (along with its terraform rating) to place on any available ocean area.
The Hellas map lacks volcanos and the Noctis region, so the tiles from the cards Noctis City and Lava Flows lose their placement restrictions and may be placed on any non-ocean area.
Milestones:
Diversifier: requires that you have 8 different tags in play.
Tactician: requires that you have 5 cards with requirements in play.
Polar Explorer: requires that you have 3 tiles on the two bottom rows.
Energizer: requires that you have 6 energy production.
Rim Settler: requires that you have 3 jovian tags.
Awards:
Cultivator: most greenery tiles.
Magnate: most automated cards in play (green cards).
Space Baron: most space tags (event cards do not count).
Eccentric: most resources on cards.
Contractor: most building tags (event cards do not count).
Elysium: Here we see the region west of Tharsis, from Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, to Elysium Montes. In the north, the great northern lowlands, Vastitas Borealis, reaches down towards the equator, while the south is dominated by its great crater-saturated highlands. The map overlaps the original game board by featuring Arsia Mons.
There are no special bonuses on this map.
The Elysium map does not have the Noctis region, so Noctis City may be placed without its restriction. It does however have four volcanic sites where the Lava Flows tile can be placed: Arsia Mons, Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons, and Hecates Tholus.
Milestones:
Generalist: requires that you have increased all 6 productions by at least one step (starting production from corporation cards count as increase).
Specialist: requires that you have at least 10 in production of any resource.
Ecologist: requires that you have 4 bio tags (plant-, microbe-, and animal tags count as bio tags).
Tycoon: requires that you have 15 project cards in play (blue and green cards).
Legend: requires 5 played cards (red cards).
Awards:
Celebrity: most cards in play (not events) with a cost of at least 20 megacredits.
Industrialist: most steel and energy resources.
Desert Settler: most tiles south of the equator (the four bottom rows).
Estate Dealer: most tiles adjacent to ocean tiles.
Benefactor: highest terraform rating. Count this award first!'
What you get: Your EUR 20 or equivalent will buy you Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium, the first expansion that came out for the resource management, economy building Terraforming Mars game line. The basic game can accommodate from one to five players in just over two hours. It has been so incredibly popular (not to mention commercially successful), that it is well-seated in the 4th place of BGG game listings. The present expansion does not affect the number of players.
The product is effectively a mounted, 52 cm x 44 cm double-sided map in shrink wrap. It contains nothing else, save the cover with the blurb you just read.
Gameplay: With such a publisher's blurb, there is literally nothing else for me to describe. Different maps, different milestones, different awards. That's it.
The strong points: It is always pleasant to tackle a game you know from a fresh perspective. Hellas & Elysium offers that fresh perspective by providing nothing but a single component, the map. This component however also changes the Milestones and Awards, thus creating a rather different game. I am setting aside the fact that these new maps are based on real Martian landscapes, thus they hold interest from the perspective of theme alone. Game-wise, the maps work differently, even though the rest of the mechanics have remained unchanged. In Hellas you are trying to create a rather large ocean. In Elysium you will be drowning in minerals. The patterns of your card play are bound to change..
The more I think about it, the more I must praise the designer for renewing the game without wasting a single second on inserting new rules. With access to three maps instead of one, the replayability of the game increases exponentially. Even more so if you have access to more of the line's expansions.
When it comes to production values, the board is of the exact same quality as the one in the basic game. The pictographs and the aesthetics are also familiar, even though they are not outright identical.
The weak points: If you were not certain as to whether the basic game is one you might like, Hellas & Elysium is unlikely to change your opinion. It introduces zero new rules or concepts; it only plays around with placement and the goals it sets for its players. As such, the product is evidently addressed to those already lured by the terraforming adventure. It is a variant, or rather two variants within the same product. Were I to compare it with the Catan game line, there is no product there that includes as few components. Even the OOP and impossibly hard to find Historische Szenarien and Historische Szenarien II that were never published in English included more than mere maps.
It is pretty evident that this is not an add-on to the basic game. It substitutes aspects of the basic game, and not much more. There is no modularity in this substitution seeing how everything is map-based. In that sense, and depending on how often you play Terraforming Mars, you might not have much use for the expansion.
The EUR 20 price is once again registered on the negatives. That is an enormous price to pay for a single component, no matter its effect on the game. This expansion should have cost around 25% to 50% less.
The map is sold within a single shrink wrap. Once you throw that, store the map within the game's main box to protect it from dust and damage.
Conclusion: Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium will be an instant hit on the tables where the original game sees frequent play. It refreshes the game through the introduction of a single component, which however affects three different engineering components (placement, milestones, awards). The catalogue price is admittedly high, even if you are part of the terraforming hardcore. Try to find it at a discount.
For more info on Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium visit Stronghold Games at https://strongholdgames.com.
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