Choice Provisions
The interstitial art between rounds of Tharsis is pretty sick.
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A lot of dread accumulates during an average playthrough of new digital board game Tharsis. To some extent, the feeling is fostered by the game's lonely, hopeless setting on an interstellar outpost. In other ways, it's thanks to the zillions of disasters that befall the astronaut crew you're attempting to help dig their way out of seemingly endless crises. A lot of virtual death comes along the way, yet the game itself is incredibly approachable thanks to a mix of board and dice game mechanics—as if Yahtzee met the resource-management world of games like Alien Frontiers.
Sheer accessibility is possibly this game's scariest aspect. As in, we're addicted, and we're not sure if that's a good thing. It's fair to call Tharsis's combination of punishing difficulty, strategic depth, and hair-pulling emphasis on luck the devil's triad—the kind of game you might find while walking through Satan's most brimstone-loaded casino. We're ever so thankful that the designers didn't attach any microtransactions to its nearly impossible journey to Mars. Otherwise, we may be be broke.
Having the pilot for dinner
The game opens aboard the space station Iktomi, staffed with experts in fields such as engineering, medicine, and piloting, en route to the first manned landing on Mars. Each gameplay session begins with an unexpected meteor destroying a vital station compartment weeks before the landing date, which sends the rest of the four-person crew on a dizzying, 10-round journey to keep both the ship functioning and its crew members alive.
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