Developer: Choice Provisions
Publisher: Choice Provisions
Rrp: £10.99 (Steam), £10.99 (Gog.com), £12.49 (Humblebundle)
Released: 12th January 2016
Available on: Steam, Gog.com and Humblebundle
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
When faced with a question there is always one thing that can be counted on and that is that humanity will seek an answer, and so when we suddenly receive a mysterious signal from Mars what do you think we do? Send a manned mission of course! What could possibly go wrong?
Tharsis is a digital board-game, at least that’s how I view it. Like most good board-games it requires a good deal of strategy a little luck. You are in command of a ship and its crew that is on a mission to investigate a strange signal coming from Mars. But the way is fraught with peril and its your job to ensure the completion of the mission and the safety of the crew.
You start off with four crew members and a countdown of ten weeks til the mission is completed. Each week (which is a turn) events will occur, these are never good. In order to survive the mission you must move the crew to the appropriate locations to fix the problems that have been caused by the events. “How do you fix them?” You may ask. With dice of course!
Each turn you can, and should, move the members of your crew into the modules that are damaged and then attempt to repair them by rolling dice. Once the dice are rolled grab the numbers you have and put them into the larger number at the top of the HUD. Hopefully you rolled well and can repair it quickly and efficiently, if not, well then it’s time to send another crew member to try and finish the job.
Each turn plays out in three phases: first is the event phase, where the events you’ll come to dread happen. Then is the crew deployment phase, where you move the crew and attempt to manage the damage. Finally there’s the damage phase, any modules not repaired will resolve and the damage / effects take place, if all the modules are repaired then no damage or events will take place.
If you deploy a character to an event you may find that your die rolls disappear, become frozen or even hurt you. This is because events regularly make certain die results unfavourable by placing them in stasis, injuring your active crew-mate or removing the die entirely. These effects are negated by the ‘assists’ you’re given, you can have a maximum of three assists and they get used automatically.
Once used up these assists can be regained by using a die in a particular module, through the choices you make in the side project phase (if they happen to appear), or by using a particular crewman’s ability to regenerate them.
Once the crew deployment and damage phases have passed you get to pick a side project to perform, Most of these projects come with positive and negative effects, although a few are without consequence.
Your rolls don’t have to go to repairing the damage caused by the events. They can be put in research to perhaps give you a better chance later, or maybe they can be used in one of the modules to get more food, assists, lower stress etc. They can even be used by the crew themselves for one of their abilities.
This is a game of strategy as it is luck. You have to decide which crewman should go where and in what order, get the order wrong and you may never recover. Of course, all the strategy in the world is no good if all your rolls are like mine, that is to say, garbage.
Between each turn you’re given a cut-scene which reveals the story. Want to see it all? Survive. It’s quite a short story, extremely so if you happen to get a lucky run, but has multiple endings dependent on several factors which keep things somewhat fresh. There are also ‘missions’ that you can take on that provide challenging situations to handle. Most of these are solved like puzzles, but of course the random element of dice rolls makes the results much more varied.
The may sound like the mewling of a sore loser but the RNG (random number generator) seems a bit one sided. I had crew members with near full health insta-killed because I was inundated with the numbers required to kill them. And it wasn’t a one time thing, it happened on multiple occasions.
If I do have a complaint (beyond calling bullshit on the RNG) about Tharsis it’s that there are certain aspects of the game that aren’t explained. Or if they are explained then it was easily missed, such as the stress system. To this day I still don’t know what affect that actually has. Some research that I have done seems to indicate that it affects what events happen somehow, but I’ve also found plenty of sources that contradict that… so I don’t know.
Do I recommend this game? Yeah, I do. I enjoyed my time with it and found that the game gave me enough challenge. Definitely worth the money, and it’ll likely be a game I install again later down the line.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Gremlins Inc
FTL
Desktop Dungeons
