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First Martians
Feb. 12th, 2023 12:39 pmFor the last few years, I've bought my brother a legacy game for Christmas, and we've played it throughout the year, with Dave. So, this year, I decided to get Dave a legacy game for his birthday, for the two of us to play at home.
I went with First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet because Dave is very keen on stuff to do with Mars.
I had some reservations because it's fully co-operative, which I'm not always a fan of (particularly playing with Dave, because we don't make a good team in certain circumstances) and the reviews said it's both really hard to win and really complicated to learn.
When we first got everything out of the box and started trying to set it up and understand the rules, I got even more apprehensive. After three hours, we'd managed to get halfway through the first round and really weren't sure how to proceed in terms of how the mechanics of some of the round phases were meant to play out. Since it was pretty late by that point, we decided to call it a night and come back to it another day.
That turned out to be a whole week later (with the game laid out on our table all week, taunting us) - at which point, we watched an hour-long YouTube video about how to play, before going back to our game to try again. The video answered all the questions I still had, which was great, so I felt confident we could actually now play - but it raised a lot more in terms of the feasibility of achieving all the requirements to win the tutorial scenario. But I was keen to give it a go and see what happened.
And what happened was that we actually beat the scenario with several rounds left to play! I really didn't think we'd have enough turns to do everything, let alone keep the base repairs up to the threshold standard for victory - but we did! Admittedly, I think we had some real luck with the dice rolls and some of the cards that came out. But I also think we did a really good job of figuring out the most important things to do and how to maximise our opportunities by allocating our actions and resources well.
And it turned out to be more fun than I expected! Though I was a bit concerned that it wouldn't be interesting enough over the course of a campaign, if it was going to be that easy...
We were both keen to keep going, so we decided to tackle one more of the stand-alone scenarios, to get a better sense of different aspects of the game. So we selected the Probe On The Loose scenario, as it focused on exploration, which we hadn't had much cause to do in the tutorial.
Again, once we'd read through the objectives, I was convinced it would be impossible - and once again, we actually achieved everything and the base was in tip-top shape, with a whole round left to play. We'd set the difficult level on the app to 'medium' rather than 'easy' this time - and there were a lot more twists and turns to contend with. More astronauts got hurt, we suffered some complicated medical conditions, we had a couple of unfortunate events, and the mission objectives were a lot more complex. But we worked together really well again, and we triumphed - and it was really fun again!
So, we're both excited about getting started on one of the campaigns, to see how the game works over the course of several connected missions. I suspect it will get a lot harder as things progress, but that doesn't bother me as much - and I'm actually looking forward to a bigger challenge.
Overall, despite some issues with initially getting to grips with everything and some anxiety on my part over whether or not the game would be a success - I'm really glad I bought it and I can't wait to play more!
I went with First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet because Dave is very keen on stuff to do with Mars.
I had some reservations because it's fully co-operative, which I'm not always a fan of (particularly playing with Dave, because we don't make a good team in certain circumstances) and the reviews said it's both really hard to win and really complicated to learn.
When we first got everything out of the box and started trying to set it up and understand the rules, I got even more apprehensive. After three hours, we'd managed to get halfway through the first round and really weren't sure how to proceed in terms of how the mechanics of some of the round phases were meant to play out. Since it was pretty late by that point, we decided to call it a night and come back to it another day.
That turned out to be a whole week later (with the game laid out on our table all week, taunting us) - at which point, we watched an hour-long YouTube video about how to play, before going back to our game to try again. The video answered all the questions I still had, which was great, so I felt confident we could actually now play - but it raised a lot more in terms of the feasibility of achieving all the requirements to win the tutorial scenario. But I was keen to give it a go and see what happened.
And what happened was that we actually beat the scenario with several rounds left to play! I really didn't think we'd have enough turns to do everything, let alone keep the base repairs up to the threshold standard for victory - but we did! Admittedly, I think we had some real luck with the dice rolls and some of the cards that came out. But I also think we did a really good job of figuring out the most important things to do and how to maximise our opportunities by allocating our actions and resources well.
And it turned out to be more fun than I expected! Though I was a bit concerned that it wouldn't be interesting enough over the course of a campaign, if it was going to be that easy...
We were both keen to keep going, so we decided to tackle one more of the stand-alone scenarios, to get a better sense of different aspects of the game. So we selected the Probe On The Loose scenario, as it focused on exploration, which we hadn't had much cause to do in the tutorial.
Again, once we'd read through the objectives, I was convinced it would be impossible - and once again, we actually achieved everything and the base was in tip-top shape, with a whole round left to play. We'd set the difficult level on the app to 'medium' rather than 'easy' this time - and there were a lot more twists and turns to contend with. More astronauts got hurt, we suffered some complicated medical conditions, we had a couple of unfortunate events, and the mission objectives were a lot more complex. But we worked together really well again, and we triumphed - and it was really fun again!
So, we're both excited about getting started on one of the campaigns, to see how the game works over the course of several connected missions. I suspect it will get a lot harder as things progress, but that doesn't bother me as much - and I'm actually looking forward to a bigger challenge.
Overall, despite some issues with initially getting to grips with everything and some anxiety on my part over whether or not the game would be a success - I'm really glad I bought it and I can't wait to play more!
