Game review: Pocket Mars

The game Pocket Mars is, in our experience, more of a puzzle than a game. We found it difficult to win (by getting all our colonists to Mars). The challenge wasn't beating the other players, it was achieving the win conditions at all.  Any thoughts of competition were dwarfed by the challenge of getting to the finish line by any means possible.

In fact, it was so difficult that we only played it twice before returning it to the charity shop from whence it came. 

In our opinion, a game needs to have a high level of player interaction.  My race to win should come at the detriment of your chances of winning.  Snakes and Ladders has no interaction, but at least it's easy and you can feel like you're competing.  However, a good game for us isn't Snakes and Ladders, where we have no interaction at all, and it's just you and the dice, then me and the dice, and we could add dozens of players without affecting the game at all.  No.  Player interaction is key - I want to win because I beat you, not just because I rolled bigger numbers or drew better cards compared to you.

And Pocket Mars feels like it has no player interaction at all - you take a turn, I take a turn.  We launch our men to Mars, we take turns to draw cards, and we see who can do the best.  It is, at best, a complicated puzzle where we each battle the rules and restrictions of the game in order to get the best outcome we can, and then compare against the other players.  The game talks about sabotaging the opponents, but this didn't happen when we played, and the game lacked any 'fun'.  It was too difficult to make any real progress in the game, and this meant that the return on effort was too high and we promptly gave up.

Nope, this game was not for us, which was a shame because it's been produced to a very high level of quality.  The box, cards and pieces all looked and felt great, but I feel that they could have been reorganised into a game that would be a lot more fun.