Recently our good friend Mike at Tasty Minstrel Games sent us review copies of Terra Prime and Homesteaders. So first of all, thanks Mike, you rock, and we hope you have a few more games in the pipeline to expand on your collection.
We played both games, and we’ll be throwing a review of Homesteaders up in the future. Now, onto the Terra Prime review.
The goal of Terra Prime is to take over planets and asteroid belts while exploring space with your ship. You collect Bluium, Greenium, Yellium, and Brownium to help fuel your ship, buy new supplies, and bribe alien attackers.
The layout is very “Tongiaki: Journey into the Unknown
So you take your ship and “explore” new regions in space. If you happen upon a planet you have the ability (depending upon your supplies) to colonize and start producing. Blue planets produce Bluium, yellow produce Yellium, and green produce Greenium. (Don’t you just love the names. We got a kick out of those.)
During your explorations you’ll also come across Asteroids and Aliens. Asteroids you’ll first have to navigate through. After that you have the option to either colonize or leave them alone. Colonized Asteroids do not have to be navigated again, uncolonized ones do, so be careful. If you do choose to colonize an Asteroid they’ll produce your Brownium.
If you come across some aliens you have two choices. If you’ve been able to upgrade your ship you might choose to attack them and take your chances. In playing we found that it was preferable to bribe the aliens instead. Sure you lose a few resources, but you take care of the threat and with the official rules, you get a few resources back as well. (I’ll talk about an alternative option in a bit.)
Overall, I personally liked the game. The others weren’t as hot on it, but I could see that with a few tweaks and unofficial rule changes it could be a good game to keep in the collection. I’d want to make sure I played with people who had been through the game before as the rules are rather lengthy (I’ve attached them to this post if you’d like to download them, and they’re available at the official Terra Prime site.)
Now, about those rule tweaks I mentioned. First, the rules say that when you’ve defeated or bribed an attacking alien you use a Reward tile to cover them so you know you don’t have to kill or bribe them again. I don’t like this as it speeds up the game play too much. Instead we used the Support tiles to cover the aliens (they have no other real use) and then collected a resource cube from each of the other players. The payoff is usually better, but the other players got to decide what the briber got so as not to make it really worthwhile to run around only bribing aliens.
The second tweak that we tried was ignoring the END at the bottom. We stopped when one of two options happened, either we explored the entire region (all tiles were flipped) or we ran out of Reward tiles. This allowed the game to last a little longer and made the adventure more fun.
Overall, I’ll give the game a 3 out of 5. It’s got a place in the closet now, but there is a possibility of it being bumped if/when something better comes along.
