Pocket Mars
Today we’re checking out Pocket Mars – a quick, space themed card game designed by Michał Jagodziński and published by Grey Fox Games. In Pocket Mars, players control a group of colonists sent from Earth to establish an infrastructure on Mars. The problem is, you aren’t the only group with that goal. Let’s check it out.
Some of the first things I always notice about a game are the art and production quality. At first glance, Pocket Mars looks great. All of the art is wonderful, though I thought that the box art felt a little out of place with the rest of the art in the game. I personally really like the blueprint style used on the Project Cards. Production quality is pretty good, with the small exception that the box is slightly too small. I had to remove the insert to prevent cards from sticking in the bottom of the box, and even after doing so, the rule book doesn’t quite sit right in the box. Everything technically fits, but it really should be just a tad bigger. The cards themselves are printed on nice cardstock with no alignment issues that I noticed, and all of the wooden tokens are high quality.
To set up, place the five building cards in reach of all players. Each player gets one of four available ship cards (with names that pay homage to famous sci-fi ships, like the “Falcon 1K”), an energy marker, and the seven colonists in their chosen color. One colonist goes on the ship, and the rest remain in a common pool (Earth). Shuffle all of the project cards together and deal four to each player. Players must then pick two cards to place face down in front of them in their “prep module”, and two to keep in their hand.
The rule book does a decent job at explaining setup and gameplay, though I did notice a few issues that could have been solved by having a rules editor take a few extra passes. There are a few little formatting issues like extra spaces and incorrect page references – for example, the solo variant scoring says to refer to the scoring section on page 10, but the scoring section doesn’t actually start until page 12. There is also one instance of ambiguous verbiage – depending on what section of the rules or which project card you are looking at, moving a colonist from Earth to your ship is referred to as “take”, “launch”, and “move”, without any explicit mention that they mean the same thing. I verified with Grey Fox to make sure they do. While all of these things annoy me a little bit, none of them really affect how the game plays, and that’s where the real test lies.
The game is played in rounds, and each round consists of one turn per player. On a player’s turn, they must take one of the available five actions – play a project card from your hand, play a project card from your prep module, play a project card from another player’s prep module (more on that in a moment), launch a colonist from earth, or discard a project card to gain an energy. Remember, the goal of the game is to get victory points, and you get victory points by getting your colonists off Earth and onto Mars.
Project Cards can be played in a number of different ways, and are the core of what makes this game interesting to me. Every Project Card has a numeric value (zero to seven), an effect when played from a player’s hand, and a different effect when played from a player’s prep module. Cards played from a player’s hand trigger their effect and get discarded, but cards played from the prep module do some additional things. When a card is played from a player’s prep module, it is placed under the building of its corresponding color and on top of any existing cards in that building. Compare the numeric value of the card you played to the value of the previous card (or the building itself if there are no other cards in that building). If your value is higher than the previous value, you can move one of your colonists from your ship to the first space in that building. You may then trigger your card’s bottom action, as well as the building’s action (even if you were unable to move a colonist). If you want to use the action of a building, but you don’t have a matching color card in your prep module, you can activate the building’s ability by playing a card from another player’s prep module, with the caveat that the player who originally owned the card still gets the option to use the ability on the project card you’re stealing. At the end of each player’s turn, they may not have more than four cards in their possession, and must always either draw up to or discard down to four cards.
The entire game takes place using the actions described above. Scoring is pretty straight forward. Each player is awarded one victory point for each colonist on their spaceship, two for each colonist on a building’s one star space, two points for having a colonist on each of the four possible buildings, three points for having four colonists in one building, and four for each colonist in a building’s two star space.
So what did I think of the game? It’s decent. It isn’t my favorite game or even my favorite filler game – not by a long shot – but it is decent. I don’t see us pulling this one out very often, but will I hold onto it? Yeah, probably. Its one saving grace is that it has a solo mode that actually plays pretty well, and adds a layer of strategy that didn’t really exist in the standard version of the game – choosing between a favorable action and what action you are enabling the AI player to take in the process. I didn’t go through the solo version in detail because from a gameplay perspective, that is the only real difference. The bottom line is, depending on where you look, you can pick this game up for ten bucks. If you are drawn to the Mars theme and can deal with some of the issues I brought up, Pocket Mars might be worth a look for you. If you are into solo games, Mars, area control, and quick play times, Pocket Mars hits all of those things at the same time.
Review copy provided by Gray Fox Games
Publisher: Gray Fox Games
Number of Players: 1-4
Age: 10+
Price at time of Review: $10
If you are interested in making a purchase based on this review, please consider using our affiliate link. If you do, we will receive a small commission.