This mission to Mars too often feels like a no-win situation.
By Rob Zacny
Luck is a fickle mistress, both for people who play games and people who make them. A little luck in the right places and a game can be tense, gripping, and delightfully unpredictable! But let Lady Luck have things all her own way, and suddenly you’ve got something that feels random, cruel, and maybe even a little mean-spirited. Something like Tharsis.
We want to hear it.
Watch Justin and Daemon fail at Tharsis above.
Tharsis takes place on a star-crossed mission to Mars where, immediately after the tutorial, the spaceship is shattered by a meteorite, two of the crew are killed, and all the food is destroyed. With a ship falling apart around them, the four surviving astronauts try to patch failing ship modules long enough to reach Mars. It’s a good setup, though the interstitial cutscenes will get old fast as the try-fail-repeat patterns of Tharsis begin to take their toll.
The resource-allocation aspect of Tharsis its strongest point.
At the start of each turn, new problems strike different modules of your ship, and if they aren’t fixed, they will inflict a different kind of harm on your ship or your crew. A failing flight control system could threaten your ship’s hull with three points of damage, and if your hull reaches zero it’s game over. On the other hand, a fire in the medical bay might do two points of health damage to every crewmember on board your ship, and as crewmembers die, completing the mission becomes much harder (if not impossible). Just choosing which problem to solve would be hard enough, especially as events carry over from turn to turn if you don’t fix them, but there are some other priorities to consider that make the resource-allocation aspect of Tharsis its strongest point.
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Watch the Tharsis announcement trailer above.
Each module has unique abilities that can help out your crew and better prepare them for problems down the road. Roll three of a kind in the greenhouse module and you will have food to feed your astronauts, which grants them extra dice with which to solve problems. Roll two of a kind in the medical bay and the astronaut working there will be fully healed. On top of that, a module can’t have more than one thing wrong with it at a time, so sometimes it’s easier to leave a minor problem in place because something worse might happen if you fix it. All these factors create a lot of satisfying opportunities for planning and prediction, and if Tharsis weren’t such a fundamentally sadistic game, it could’ve been a lot of fun to manage all these competing priorities.
Tharsis just seems to say, “You made some good calls, but now you lose.”
The problem is that there are times that Tharsis just seems to say, “You made some good calls, but now you lose.” I’ve had quite a few games where things were going surprisingly well: my crew were mostly healthy, my ship’s hull was in okay shape, and I only had one minor problem dealing some easily handled damage each turn. Then, at the start of the new turn, Tharsis would toss up a set of unbelievably bad events that instantly dealt enough potential damage to destroy my ship, and then make them almost impossible to fix in time to survive to the next turn… when a new round of disasters would strike and start piling on more harm to my beleaguered crew.
The way you attempt to solve all these problems is by rolling some lovingly animated virtual dice. They make a weighty sound as they roll around on the screen, and move with a slight slow-motion effect that shows them teetering between the number you need and the number that dooms you. Each roll becomes a dramatic event as you wait to see whether disaster or a miracle will strike.
The decision-making comes about as you send crew members, each with their own pool of up to five six-sided dice, into modules to repair them. Each malfunction on the ship has a target number, reduced by allocating dice to it. So if the medical bay is starting to fill with smoke and the target number is 22, and your mechanic rolls a five, three, and six, you could reduce that target number all the way down to eight. It’s easy enough to understand.
But there’s another catch – a final punch to the kidneys from Tharsis. Each problem also creates the potential for bad things to happen on your crew member’s roll. An example: I had an event that dealt two points of hull damage each turn, with a target number of 22. Not such a big deal to fix… except that on rolls of four, five, and six my crew members would be injured or their dice destroyed. So you can have multiple events going on at once where full half your dice rolls results in bad things happening, and sometimes it’s the good rolls that are the most punishing. In this instance, only rolls that could save me would also doom me.
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Dice, by the way, don’t replenish between turns unless you feed your crew, which is pretty hard to do when you have problems breaking out all over your ship. Hard, that is, unless you eat dead (or freshly killed!) crew members, which fully replenishes your dice pool but also freaks out your surviving astronauts.
When things did go well, I felt like I’d gotten lucky rather than I’d done something clever.
That’s why it so often felt like Tharsis was just burying me in unsolvable problems, and all the decisions of the past three or four turns were meaningless because a giant set of “screw you”s were on their way the entire time. This also means success are less satisfying. When things did go well, I felt like I’d gotten lucky rather than I’d done something clever. Sometimes terrible things happened and I couldn’t do anything about them. Sometimes they didn’t, and things were fine without much input required. I could skew the odds a bit, but nowhere near enough to affect what Tharsis’ random events did.
Any luck-based game will occasionally create moments where defeat feels cruel and arbitrary. I play a lot of wargames on PC and tabletop, and there’s nothing worse than watching your best tank get blown sky-high because your opponent hit a one-in-50 shot with a bazooka from halfway across the map. But that’s just one event in a system whose outcomes are still mostly the product of decision making.
Tharsis can never stop reminding you that you don’t have control over its interstellar disaster, just the illusion of it. Every time I watched my ship fall apart, and every time I watched new events propagate across the ship that were completely impossible to stop, I felt like, win-or-lose, Tharsis was having all the fun.
