Stonemaier Games Scythe vs Stronghold Games Terraforming Mars

Scythe looks like a war game and plays like an economic race. Jamey Stegmaier designed it for Stonemaier Games in 2016, set in an alternate 1920s Eastern Europe painted by Jakub Rozalski, where farms sit beside giant mechs. Each player leads one of five factions with its own powers, paired with a player board that changes the cost of each action, so the same faction plays differently from game to game.

Turns are fast. You move your piece on your player board to a new action, take the top action, and often the bottom one too. There are no rounds or phases, so downtime is low even with five players. Combat exists, but attacking costs popularity, which shrinks your final score, so most of the tension is the threat of a fight rather than the fight itself. The game ends when someone places their sixth star for achievements.

Price and size come first. At $84 tracked, this is the most expensive pick, and the box takes real table space. Players expecting constant battles will find the game quieter than the art suggests. The first game takes a while to teach, and efficient action combos reveal themselves only over repeat plays.

Terraforming Mars is the strategy game that most hobby players would keep if they could keep one. Jacob Fryxelius designed it for FryxGames in 2016, and Stronghold Games publishes it in the US. Each player runs a corporation helping make Mars habitable: raising temperature, adding oxygen and placing oceans. Those three shared tracks end the game, but points go to whoever profited most along the way.

The engine is the deck. The box holds 208 project cards and 17 corporations, and a game deals you a handful of each from which you keep what fits. Cards raise your production, react to what other players do, or chain into combinations that pay off over many generations. Because the card pool is so large, the tenth game rarely resembles the first.

The drawbacks are real. The listed 120 minutes runs longer with new players or five at the table, and a solo game takes about as long. Components are functional rather than pretty: thin player boards let production cubes slide when bumped, which many owners fix with third-party overlays. Card text is dense, so the first game can feel like reading. The first few generations build little.