"Its the journey, not the destination that matters" -Said someone sometime

This is a dice game with a Random Number Generator at its core. I want to stress the word RANDOM. That means you will lose and lose a lot because the game randomly decided to make you lose. The same as when you roll dice in real life and they land however they land. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

If you do not like to lose, then do not buy this game. Your crew will die, your ship will explode, and you will lose the game because of a completely random bad roll of the dice and it will happen often, but everything can go good too and you can win. It is a RNG system, just roll with the punches and work with what you get.

Ok, if you are still interested, then the game does have other elements to it besides random dice rolls. You can use research cards with special abilities that help. Each module on the ship has a special ability that can be activated, and there are random events that occur in between turns that have choices that can help and hinder you. Your crew also have a different special ability each.

There is a easy and quick tutorial, gameplay is pretty straight forward and does not vary much throughout the game. You will get random events that you need to roll dice to resolve. These events themselves can be many different random things, but besides the random hazards, they all are resolved the same way by rolling dice. Hazards can be putting your dice in "stasis", "voiding" your dice, and causing injury to your crew if you roll the number associated with the hazard.

The dice themselves represent your crew members "energy". They can eat food or use abilites or cards (research) to get more dice. With no dice (energy) the crew will not be able to fix the ship. The ship itself has a health bar as well and when it takes too much damage from events not being fixed it will fall apart and its game over. Another mechanic that comes into play is crew stress levels. The higher the stress, the crazier the crew member gets and possibly worse consequences will follow if they do not destress.



I tried to cover as much as possible. Overall I find the game to be interesting and fun. It does get somewhat repetitive after playing it for a bit, but I am still having fun playing a round or two every once in a while. I am also excited to see what the developers will offer for DLC and patches.

Its fun and I would recommend the game to anyone who loves to play dice. I also like the space theme too so that helps some. Good game for the price in my opinion. Good Luck!!

— I’m not a fan of survival games.
— I think that dice games are meh.
— Tharsis is both.
— I dig Tharsis a lot.
Tharsis is a game about making hard choices. Let yourself immerse in the game, and it’ll tell you a story about the struggle for survival on a space station on its way to Mars. Things will go south, the odds are against you, but hey, it’s deep space, and it’s supposed to be unfair. And remember: you cannot fix everything.
Currently you can grab the game for $1 at https://www.humblebundle.com/survive-this-bundle

In my opinion a real gem.
An unforgiving dice game where the odds are against you.
A tale of brutal survival in space.
I won 3 out of something like 300 games.
The rules have a fairly steep learning curve. It takes knowing them all to succesfully launch a good strategy, but It's all worth it. Considering each game takes up to 10 turns (often less) it's pretty amazing that I've logged in 20 hrs and keep playing.

The developer is actively working and updating the game. The last couple of updates made some positive changes but even in the early stages this felt like a complete game.

If you enjoy making tough decisions and taking calculated risks this game is for you.

Tharsis is a turn-based strategy game where players roll dice to help a surviving squad of four astronauts as they try and repair a highly damaged spaceship. The crew is rapidly approaching Mars, and a mysterious signal provides an eerie backstory as players approach the planet. If the player can survive ten turns, they’ll get to see one of the game’s endings, but it will quickly become apparent how much of a challenge just surviving to see the end of Tharsis truly is.

The game comes courtesy of Choice Provisions, who certainly have experience with investing in success: they’re the studio that made Bit.Trip, one of the most successful indie games of all time. I'm no stranger to hard-to-survive space games, but even by my standards, Tharsis will bring even the most robust players to their knees as they learn the ropes.. The game follows the disastrous voyage of the fictional ship Iktomi, where meteors have damaged the ship to the point where the vessel is often only one in-game turn away from imploding.

As problems arise on different sections of the ship, crew members must roll their hard-earned dice to try and stem the flow of the figurative (and sometimes literal) fire. For every turn a crew member takes an action, however, they lose one of their dice for the next turn. So someone who had a turn with 4 dice will only have 3 to use the next turn, and so on. These can be replenished by rolling doubles or more in one of the ship’s specialized rooms or by acquiring a food item before the start of a new turn, and players will soon find that crew members with two or less dice are unlikely to help save the ship from destruction.

This isn’t helped by the fact that some disasters put modifiers in play when crew members attempt to roll dice to fix them. For instance, a fire in the medical bay might have things called void, statis, or injury modifiers. If it has 6 as a void and a player rolls that die, it simply disappears and can’t be used to count against the total damage that must be fixed to stop the fire. Similarly, statis means that players can’t re-roll that die if they hit the same number, and injury means the crew member will lose health if they roll that number.

Multiple injury modifiers stack as well, meaning sometimes players will even find relatively healthy crew members alive one moment and dead the next. Players can protect themselves by earning assists, which block the modifiers from effecting the roll, but these get used up very quickly. Players can also dump some of their dice into ‘Research Projects’ that provide boosts like assists, health, repair, and health. A well-timed research project can often be the difference between life and death.

Crew members on the Iktomi have two important stats: the aforementioned health, and stress. The first stat has obvious repercussions should it be depleted: the crew member dies, and players are forced to try and keep the ship together with even less people. The second stat, stress, impacts what happens after a turn ends. Surviving crew members present the player with a few mid-turn options: repair the ship at the cost of more stress, get some food at the cost of hurting someone, and other balanced sacrifices. The more stress a crew member has, the more awful their suggestion becomes, potentially forcing a player to make moves they wouldn’t ever want to make.

Then cannibalism comes into play. The game starts off with a dead crew member on board, and after a few turns players have the option to deprive certain crew members of their humanity and get them to eat pieces of the zero-gravity carcass. These chunks of meat will restore dice for the crew members and can truly be a saving grace, but resorting to cannibalism drastically increases the stress on the hungry crew member, and their virtual avatars certainly reflect that they’re not exactly sane anymore. The dice they roll from then on are covered in blood as a reminder of their actions, and the player – should they succeed in reaching Mars – will lose some points for having to resort to it.

It’s evident that Choice Provisions didn’t have the largest budget for Tharsis, and it shows the most in the bland and generic graphics put into each crew member’s face. It makes them all look similar, and we felt like more unique-looking crew members would have helped in terms of presentation. That said, the ship Iktomi actually has plenty of little details put into it, and the haunting soundtrack does the game justice. All-in-all, a turn-based dice game doesn’t ultimately need to rely on impressive graphics, and Tharsis gets along well without them.

Tharsis is a game for those who love tabletop gaming and a challenging experience. At its heart Tharsis is as unforgiving as it is entertaining, but it offers very little variety in terms of the overall game. There’s one ship and a limited selection of crew members to unlock, and players will bear witness to the same cutscenes game after game, which after the first playthrough are likely going to be skipped forever. Tharsis has a surprisingly addictive quality, and tabletop fans who want to roll the dice on it should find it well-worth the price – but be warned, a voyage on the Iktomi isn’t for the faint of heart.

I want to like it. Interesting concept, interesting execution, smooth controls, tense and stressful... but utterly imbalanced. You start with the ship nearly destroyed, too few crew, next to no food, etc. Fine, but then don't ALSO make it so punishing that you will lose resources every turn too. If I start next to empty, maybe make it possible to go up from there? "Easy" mode is brutal.

But really, it's the "not my fault" kills that feel unfair. I have a guy with 5/5 dice and 4/6 health, almost maxed out stats... but then go in a room and roll poorly ONCE and he's dead. One. Bad. Roll. Dead. And without him, I need to restart because you CANNOT win without all four crew alive and near-max. One bad roll and the game is over. That's not fair or interesting. If I lose, can it at least be related to something I did?

There's a special class of games that I've taken to calling "risk management" games. These were pioneered by the XCOM series and, more recently, popularized with Darkest Dungeon. Whereas most games are wholly or mainly skill-based, risk management games lay your fate at the mercy of the random number gods. This isn't to say they don't take skill into account, but rather that skill plays a very different part in winning.

I'm yammering about this because Tharsis is a particularly vicious risk management game, and if I'm going to recommend it then you need to know what that means. Tharsis is the story of the unluckiest expedition to Mars ever, even moreso than Ice Cube and his crew. A signal has been detected on the Tharsis plateau of the red planet, and en route to investigate the ship gets hit by meteorites. This destroys the supply stores, kills two of the crew, and gets you through the tutorial and into the action. If you've ever seen the film Sunshine, you'll feel right at home.

The action here, mind you, is dice rolling. You have 10 weeks to survive to reach Mars, and every week a host of problems crop up on the ship. Each of your four remaining crew members can move to a problem and try to fix it, by rolling dice and trying to beat the value of the disaster. Dice roughly translates to stamina in this game, each of the crew can have up to five dice to roll but deploying them each week costs one die for the following week. Dice can be used for other actions as well, as each section of the ship has a different purpose like restoring dice or repairing the hull. Your crew also has special abilities that can be activated with a die at 5 or 6, and there's a research system where you can bank one of each die value to spend on special effects. Most crew members get one re-roll per turn as well, and dice can be held between rolls if you like how they came up but need to see how things shake out before spending dice.

As you may have gathered, there's a ton of simple systems that add up to a wide array of interconnected options. And you'll need them all, because the situation is often stacked against you. Disasters can take over 20 points to resolve, and wreck your ship if you fail to reach the quota. Disasters can also put special effects on rolls like injuring crew or deleting dice (which can be countered by Assists granted by yet another ship system!). And if you don't address a problem one week, it carries over to the next. Your crew also has health and stress to manage, killing them if the former bottoms out and making them dangerous an unpredictable if the latter gets too high. Between weeks there are also trade-off choices to make, usually between health, hull, stress, and dice. You can also grant food rations to restore dice, or resort to cannibalism if you're desperate. I haven't tried eating my crew yet, but it adds a nice bit of flavor (heh heh) to the game.

The fact that all of these options are limited by dice rolls is the key. It would be simple to work out plans and assign resources if all of your actions were of static value. But you will absolutely have situations where you send a crew with five dice to resolve an 8-point problem, and they roll all ones. This is where the risk management element comes into play, because you're not playing to solve every problem. You're playing to minimize your losses and prepare for the worst. Sometimes your crew is going to fail you, and it's going to mean someone will die, and the challenge will be finding a way to mitigate the damage and soldier on. There are no perfect runs in Tharsis, and that's the way it's meant to be.

For people rubbed the wrong way by that, a recent patch DID add an easy mode that I managed to beat on my second attempt ever, so I imagine it's balanced around being very beatable. My first attempt at normal was also a success, but the second spiraled out of control in a way that I'm not sure I could have recovered from. I don't know if every game is winnable or not, but I'm also enjoying learning and experimenting until I get to the point that I can determine that. You can unlock additional crewmembers to use, along with spookier portraits for them. There are also ten challenge scenarios to attempt as well, so it's not like I'll run out of people to kill or ways to kill them.

The presentation is polished and inviting, with fully 3D ship dioramas and horrified crew to enjoy. The menus are equally clean, with clear buttons and descriptions of what they do (a must in a game like this). Sound design is appropriately somber and technical, striking just the right tone for eating your shipmates so you have the strength to stop the fire in life support. In the end, the only question that really matters is, do you have the patience for a game like this? There is skill to the gameplay, but moreso even than XCOM or Darkest Dungeon your success is measured in how far the dice rolls will go to meet your skill. Sometimes you're going to lose, and you'll feel helpless in the face of annihilation. If you're not cool with that, give this one a pass. But if you want to tax your problem-solving skills, and live on the razor's edge of a dice roll, Tharsis delivers the goods.

The problem with games that rely on RNG is that people to don't recognize that the game isn't "spin to win," it's about managing the RNG. Everyone complains that RNG games determine win or loss based on the roll of the dice, but in reality, that's not the case. In Tharsis, you can manage your resources and prepare yourself for bad rolls. Even if you got horrible rolls, there's a chance you could survive if you strategize. All in all, great game. Don't let the RNG-haters skew your view on this game.

Quite fun, basically a cooperative boardgame where you are playing all the roles. Particularly similar to Elder Sign, but the theme is quite fun. I do wish it weren't in 3-D because it doesn't play on laptop very well because of it, and it's not the sort of game made to be played on a desktop. I also wish you could see what precisely each room is looking for in a roll without entering the room (though you can back out after and go somewhere else).

While I believe that Tharsis is a truly underrated game, I think it's not for everyone - it's a dice game afterall.

In my opinion, the gameplay it's indeed heavily luck-based, BUT there's a good portion of strategy too. Every choice matters and a cautious management makes all difference here. Tharsis works in a similar way of 100% Orange Juice - a brutal game of dice that can be overcomed with careful planning.

The graphics are really well made and the soundtrack...oh boy, is marvelous. That being said, I think there's little variety for the asking price (but it's addicting and if you like it, you will play a lot) and, despite my liking for Tharsis, I can only recommend it if you buy it with at least 50% of discount or in a bundle, but this is just my opinion.

What makes me sad about all this are the mixed-to-negative reviews of people who clearly aren't the target audience of this kind of game. Imagine how it would be if people started complaining about The Binding of Isaac being "too random" or Dark Souls being "too difficult" and start writing a lot of negative reviews. Tharsis were made as a labour of love, but sadly it gets little love back.

Finally, let's balance all this:

*Really addictive gameplay
*Great amount of depth, despite the lack of variety
*Awesome immersive soundtrack - a mix between FTL and the theme from Stranger Things
*Good connection with your characters

*Heavily luck-based game, but with a decent amount of strategy
*The blood dice effect cannibalism may shock some people. It's really well done

*Lack of variety (just one ending - Edit: there are multiple endings, but I've seen one at the time of writing - no other ships [scenarios] to play)
*The story gets old really fast, since you're replaying a lot to get your wins

Nevermind the negative reviews. If you read them, you will realize that they do not understand this game.
This game is about one thing. DAMAGE CONTROL.

To further elaborate. It is a game about managing bad incidents. It's not a game about luck or a game about winning. It is a game that makes you think very very hard on how to survive when you-know-what hits the fan.

The purpose of the game is to try and make the best out of an insanely BAD situation. That's it. If you don't find this idea intruiging or if you are a person who can't stand to lose then simply this game is not for you.

For what this game is, it is very good and the execution of the concept is great. It has a somewhat steep learning curve in regards to what station module has what effect etc etc but once you get the hang of it then it's all about strategy and damage control. The info buttons help a lot at first. Use them.

Is it brutal and unforgiving? YES and YES. With capital letters for emphasis. Can things go south very very fast? YES. But that is a good thing. When playing Tharsis you should always anticipate disaster. Even when things are seemingly going your way.

If you have ever played Elder Sign on Android, Tharsis is similar in concept and brutality :)