Terraforming Mars was one of my favorite board games of 2016. It’s a game of interesting scope with a lot of viable strategies—from ultra-focused economic engines to agile generalist and opportunist builds. It’s an experience I’d recommend to almost anyone interested in this type of complex economic strategy board game, or the concept. Its only real downsides are its lengthy setup and roughly two-hour playtime. I recently got a chance to spend some time with an unfinished build of the upcoming digital edition, and it really solves one of my problems with the game.

If you’re not familiar, let me give you the rundown. You and your opponents are megacorporations in the far future, all preparing for the daunting task of terraforming our celestial neighbor into a place fit for human habitation. You’ll heat up Mars, increase the amount of oxygen in its atmosphere, green its surface, erect arcologies, build orbital infrastructure, and fill oceans. Those who contribute to the project more will receive additional funding from the United Nations. 

Each round of the game—called a generation—you buy and play cards that represent projects undertaken, like crashing comets into the planet surface, building farms in the noctis labyrinthus, or, uh, introducing hardy lichens to the surface. Cards let you spend and manipulate resources like Credits, Steel, Titanium, Plants, Energy, and Heat—and that’s where the real meat of the game is. These interlocking resources form an interesting web that it’s satisfying to manipulate and spend.

On the tabletop, the game’s setup and reset time are a big factor: a player can end the game with twenty or thirty cards sitting in front of them, along with a huge pile of resources, that all have to be reset and reshuffled to restart the game. Digital editions of complex games can be a huge boon, letting them get played for hundreds of hours more than they’d otherwise ever get played because of problems like scheduling and setup time. It seems like this will be a boon for Terraforming Mars, as I was able to knock out 1v1 matches in under an hour. Human decision, however, will slow the game down considerably—I don’t expect that multiplayer matches will be any faster than the tabletop game takes. It feels like you’ll really just cut out the setup time—and for me, for this game, that’s probably going to be enough.

A secondary benefit is that this game is way, way prettier than the tabletop version ever was. Suffering from a lack of cohesive visual design and lackluster art, Terraforming Mars was always carried by its superior gameplay rather than its looks. That’s quite different in this digital edition, with the planet rendered as a model that evolves and changes, rather than a drab board with some hex tiles. Animated cities sprout from the planet’s surface and asteroids crash into the surface. Greenery appears not just as you place it on the board, but as the atmosphere and infrastructure develop. Formerly drab installations from the early game change and evolve into the late game, developing rings of green—it’s one of those small touches that does so much to enhance the fantasy of a game.

Terraforming Mars’ digital edition is due to release this quarter.

Perhaps in the past few weeks you have enjoyed building domes, delving mines, and pumping water in survival city-builder Surviving Mars. It’s a game that serves a very specific kind of player, one who thrives under pressure and loves to see their planning come to fruition. It rewards a kind of long-term strategic thinking that relies on consistency in moment-to-moment choices. It’s about knowing what your plans are, but also knowing when to spend those carefully-hoarded resources on a power station right now rather than saving them for that new factory.

But, given its relative success, it must also appeal to some other kind of player. The dreamers among us. The people who love the basic idea, the fantasy, of humanity reaching for the stars and colonizing another planet. It is, given the rapt attention that seemingly every nerd I know pays to SpaceX’s every maneuver, not a stretch to say that lots of people interested in strategy games want to go to Mars. Living on the red planet is a fantasy that lots of us seem to enjoy.

So if you're interested in Surviving Mars, how about not just surviving, but thriving? Delicious board game Terraforming Mars imagines just that, outlining a reality where the red planet is set to be turned into a new Earth—given atmosphere, liquid water, and a liveable temperature. Of course, all of that is expensive, so the covert capitalism of Surviving Mars is thrown out the window in favor of some overt capitalism a la Offworld Trading Company: congratulations, you're now a megacorporation.

In each round of Terraforming Mars—called a generation, given the huge time scale of a terraforming operation—players choose corporate objectives, lining up new jobs, then executing projects and constructions on Mars and in surrounding space. At its heart, it’s an engine-building game. You spend resources to get cards that let you get resources more efficiently, gathering them up and assembling them like parts of an engine. 

You might specialize your company into constructing rovers and producing steel, for example, ensuring that as you use that steel to construct new cities you make a portion of your investment back. After all, those people in the dome cities need your rovers to get around.

The trick is to do that better, and sooner, than any of the other players at the table. You compete with other players over real estate on the planet, but more than that you compete for milestones: who can found more cities, who can fill more oceans, and who can raise the planetary temperature (I recommend crashing down a few dozen asteroids for that last one. Knocks the ol' thermometer right up). 

Terraforming Mars is good because, like Surviving Mars, it's a game about balancing moment-to-moment choices with a long term strategy. You don't know what random opportunities are going to come into your hand each round—your pool of projects come from a random draw—but you do know your overall strategy. Whereas in many other games you can simply choose a strategy, then execute it, Terraforming Mars forces you to adapt that strategy on the fly.