Tharsis Game Review

Tharsis is a turn-based game by Choice Provisions. The game is about a spaceship on it's way to the Tharsis region of Mars to investigate a mysterious signal. Of course, everything goes horribly pear-shaped in no time flat and it's up to you to guide the crippled ship and its hapless crew to Mars, hopefully before the cannibalism and insanity set in.

The game works kind of like a board game. You have a ship divided into different modules. Each module has a special ability like provide food units, heal the crew etc. You're limited to a crew of four but you can choose from a collection of characters, each with their own abilities. Every turn, a new problem comes up such as a module needing repairs or else it damages the ship or damages the crew in the next turn. If the ship takes too much damage, everyone dies. The player must deploy the crew to perform repairs and other actions that may prove helpful such as harvesting food or healing up a wounded character. The challenge of the game lies in crisis management; balancing urgent priority actions with long-term beneficial actions... also, unbelievably cruel RNG.

Everything is fine. I mean, we're only going to explode next turn.

This game has been criticized for being overly reliant on random numbers. It's an understandable sentiment. See, majority of the actions in this game require a dice roll and I mean a literal dice roll. You roll a die and use the value to perform specific actions. For example, if you want to heal a crew member in the med bay, you need to roll a 5 or higher and then spend the winning die on the med bay slot. If you want to repair a module, you need to accumulate, say, 18 points so you need to roll die and spend the values you get cumulatively. Some modules require you to spend several die of equal value to each other. For example, to repair the ship in the engine room, you need at least two die of the same value. The value is not important as long as both die are the same. 

What makes it more challenging is that some modules make certain die rolls dangerous. For example, 3 can be assigned the "void" penalty which means any die that gets a 3 will disappear and cannot be spent on anything. Sometimes, die with a value of say, 6, can be given the "injury" penalty which means every 6 a crew member gets will drain his health by a point. A die value that leads to "stasis" cannot be re-rolled but can only be spent. The only way to counter status effects is to get "assist" points which block their effects per assist point you have on hand. Of course, the only way to get assists is to roll 5 or higher in the assist point module.
 

Bad rolls = bad end

Personally, I don't mind the random nature of the game. I play a lot of board games so there is that. But I can see how the reliance of die rolls can frustrate players who aren't used to this sort of thing. In other games that have a lot of RNG, like XCOM or Darkest Dungeon, the player at least feels some measure of control like outfitting his troops with the right items or bringing extra torches to reduce the edge of random factors. In Tharsis, it always seems to come down to a roll of the dice. Perhaps that's the greatest flaw of Tharsis: it doesn't hide its randomness mechanics well. It's a matter of perspective. A die roll feels so naked. The player always feels like it all came down to something beyond his control. Sometimes the game is just too random and doesn't properly reward good choices made by the player and instead just keeps heaping on the pain and misery relentlessly and remorselessly. Sometimes it doesn't! Who knows?

That doesn't mean to say there's no strategy involved in this game. There's a lot of thinking to it although it's obscured by the randomness of its core mechanic of dice rolling. Different characters have different abilities you can use to mitigate troublesome effects but you need to figure out who goes first and when. The amount of die a crew member can roll decreases per turn so you occasionally need to gather food to replenish it whether from the hydroponics lab or some other less savory places. At least the corpses of your dead crew mates are good for something, eh? You can also spend dice on the research tab for useful abilities, some of which are quite powerful.

 In between every round, the player is given choices too. Some crew members will prioritize ship repairs while others may prefer healing up. The choices are mutually exclusive and choosing one or not choosing the other can have negative consequences. How demented the player's choices are depends on the stress level of the crew. The more stressed they are, the less rational their proposals will be. 

Abuse their abilities if you want to live.

The sound effects and music are just OK. It could have used a nice catchy soundtrack like FTL but it's no big deal.

All in all, I found it fun but only because I'm already so used to roguelike games and games with a lot of random elements in it. If you like that sort of thing, this deserves a look. If you're the type of gamer that doesn't have the patience for it and hates random numbers and starting over and over again, this isn't for you.

That's totally understandable.

Randumb Effects and Hearthstone

So I play this game called, Hearthstone. Think of it as an online card-playing game. If you're familiar with Magic: The Gathering, it's like that in concept. You have a deck of cards filled with creatures and spells and you fight other player's decks to see who can reduce his opponent's life points to zero first. It's not about who has the biggest deck but about who uses his deck the most effectively.

Hearthstone is fun but only for a while. Fatigue starts setting in when you realize you're fighting the same decks over and over again. You see, back in the old days of collectible card games, the "pros" would do all the complex math and calculations to come up with the best combinations of cards. The pros would eventually find the best deck that can win tournaments. As a result, other pros would create decks specifically made to counter the tournament decks. This layer of trendsetting and trend-countering is what is called a "meta". It's this high level of play that separates the tournament pro and the scrub.

Of course, back then card games weren't online. Tournaments weren't fought and won day after day. Things took time and the meta-game took long to develop.  In Hearthstone however, everything moves so fast. Thousands of card games are played everyday and thanks to social media, players can easily watch the  high-ranked pros play live on their stream. The meta-game is realized quickly as players can see which deck leads to the most victories.

I find this annoying.

Fatigue sets in. You start to get tired once you've fought the same old decks again and again. If you fight a warlock, you know he's either going to be a "zoolock" or a "handlock". It used to be that when you fought a rogue, she was always going to be a "miracle rogue" who was always gonna end the game with the Leeroy card. If it was a hunter, you could expect hounds to be played always and forever. 

It got repetitive but Blizzard has attempted to remedy this by releasing a new expansion called Goblins and Gnomes. GnG added plenty of new cards to the game. This is good but the noticeable gimmick with a lot of the new cards is that they have random effects or can summon random creatures.

 Before you think I'm some killjoy who doesn't enjoy random effects, then let me explain why I find this to be a lazy but inevitable solution to the repetitiveness problem.

Eventually, the best decks will emerge. As always, people will look it up online and copy-paste it and use it to climb up the competitive ladder etc. However, the randomness ensures that we won't feel that we've seen the same match twice. Let's say, hypothetically, that "bomber warrior" and "mecha mage" became the new hotness (I made these up but part of me wishes they were real). Everyone will run these decks and we'll fall into repetitiveness. BUT since random effects happen, it would ensure that no two matches are completely the same. In one match, a random crappy minion could randomly appear from a shredder or unstable portal. However, in another match, a legendary card or the perfect situational minion could come out and win the entire game! 

It's these games that we remember the most; the games with the random game-winning bullshit that gives players hilariously undeserved victories. We find it so funny, that we forget the fact that everyone is playing the same thing and nothing interesting is happening otherwise. Randomness may be good or bad but randomness is necessary if we're gonna play the same damn thing over and over again. It prevents the game from becoming too stale too fast.

Personally, I used to have a problem with randomness until I thought about it and understood its necessity and inevitability. If you don't like randomness, then it's perfectly fine to craft a deck without cards with random effects; then you'll have only the luck of the draws to complain about.

It's still annoying though.