The 5 Best Board Games Like Terraforming Mars

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The best board game like Terraforming Mars is Ark Nova — it runs the same card-driven engine, the same slow-burn thrill of watching your production machine finally click, but with the downtime, the runaway leader, and the luck-of-the-draw sanded down. That is the short answer. The longer, more useful answer is that Terraforming Mars is really four different games sharing one box, and the game you should buy next depends on which one of them you actually fell in love with.

Which Terraforming Mars are you actually missing?

Ask ten people why they love Terraforming Mars and you will get four different games back. Figure out which one is yours before you spend a dime, because the “best” alternative is completely different for each:

• The card engine. If the hit was drafting project cards, comboing them, and watching your productions tick upward turn after turn — Ark Nova is the sharper, meaner version of exactly that feeling.
• The Mars fantasy. If it was the theme — corporations, the red planet turning blue and green, the map filling in — Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition keeps the entire universe and cuts the runtime to an hour.
• The epic scale. If you loved that Terraforming Mars felt like a strategic monument — a table-hogging, brain-burning campaign of an evening — Gaia Project goes bigger and deeper.
• The tight economy. If the joy was squeezing every last resource, hating every wasted cube — Underwater Cities is Terraforming Mars with all the slack removed.

And there is a fifth reader we will not forget: the person who loved the idea of Terraforming Mars but found it too long, too fiddly, or too mean. For you, Wingspan is the on-ramp — the same engine-building dopamine in a fraction of the time and none of the friction. Here is how all five stack up.

Game	Players	Play time	Our complexity read	Best for the TM fan who wants…
Ark Nova	1–4	90–150 min	Heavy	more interaction, less luck
TM: Ares Expedition	1–4	~60 min	Medium	the same universe, faster
Gaia Project	1–4	60–150 min	Very heavy	a bigger, deeper engine
Underwater Cities	1–4	~40 min/player	Heavy	a tighter, meaner economy
Wingspan	1–5	40–70 min	Medium-light	a lighter, friendlier on-ramp

1. Ark Nova — the game Terraforming Mars fans were waiting for

If you only buy one game off this list, buy Ark Nova. It is the closest thing on the market to “Terraforming Mars, patched.” You play animal, sponsor, and project cards to build a modern zoo, and the loop is instantly familiar: your early cards feel underwhelming, then somewhere in the mid-game the machine you have quietly assembled starts paying off in a rush, and you spend the last third scrambling to cash it in before the game ends. That is the Terraforming Mars arc, note for note.

What Ark Nova fixes is the stuff Terraforming Mars veterans grumble about. The clever action-tempo system (your five action cards get stronger the longer you leave them unused) means there is almost no dead downtime — you are always weighing a real decision. Card balance is tighter, so a single lucky draw rarely runs away with the game the way a hot Terraforming Mars corporation can. It is a demanding, AP-prone heavyweight, and it earned its place at the top of the hobby’s rankings on merit.

Who should skip it: if your table already found Terraforming Mars too heavy or too long, Ark Nova is a step up in both, not down — and it drops the sci-fi theme entirely. Zoo-builders who wanted more Mars specifically should look at Ares Expedition instead.

2. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition — the same universe, in an hour

Ares Expedition is the answer to the most common Terraforming Mars complaint of all: “I love it, but I can never get it to the table because it takes all night.” It is a standalone reimplementation — same corporations, same terraforming goals, same card-driven engine — but it swaps the shared board and clunky turn order for simultaneous action selection. Everyone picks a phase at once, everyone who chose it acts, and the game moves. Play time drops to about 60 minutes.

You keep the thing that makes Terraforming Mars special — building a personal engine of cards that combo off your chosen tags — while losing the sprawl. It is more of a solitaire race than the original (less fighting over board placement), but for a lot of groups that is a feature, not a bug: no more one player agonizing while four others check their phones. Because it is standalone, you do not need the original to play it.

Who should skip it: if what you loved about Terraforming Mars was the tense fight over ocean tiles and city placement on the shared map, Ares Expedition will feel a little lonely. Purists sometimes find it a touch too streamlined. For them, the original — or Ark Nova — hits harder.

3. Gaia Project — when you want the engine to go even bigger

Some Terraforming Mars fans do not want it fixed — they want more. More depth, more turns to plan, more of that “my whole civilization is one interlocking machine” feeling. Gaia Project is where you go. It is a spatial 4X engine-builder set on a modular galaxy, with fourteen wildly asymmetric factions, each of which literally colonizes different planet types and warps the puzzle around itself. It is one of the most respected heavy Euros ever made.

The connective tissue to Terraforming Mars is the economic engine: you are constantly upgrading buildings that boost your income of ore, credits, knowledge, and power, and every upgrade opens the next one. Where Terraforming Mars pours that engine into cards, Gaia Project pours it onto a map you are physically expanding across. It scratches the “optimize a growing economy for two hours” itch harder than almost anything.

Who should skip it: this is the heaviest game on the list and it shows no mercy to newcomers — there is no cards-carry-the-theme charm to soften the math, and faction asymmetry means a rough first game. If Terraforming Mars was already at your group’s complexity ceiling, Gaia Project will crash straight through it.

4. Underwater Cities — Terraforming Mars with the slack removed

Underwater Cities is the pick that most quietly outlives Terraforming Mars in people’s collections. It marries a card-tableau engine to a network-building puzzle — you place cards into three colored slots, and matching a card’s color to its slot triggers a bonus, so every play is a tense little optimization. Meanwhile you are laying tunnels and domes into a growing undersea metropolis. It feels like Terraforming Mars if Terraforming Mars punished you for wasting a single action.

That tightness is the whole appeal. Terraforming Mars gives you slack — turns where you shrug and buy a card. Underwater Cities does not; you almost never have enough actions for everything you want, and the color-matching means the “perfect” play and the “available” play are constantly at war. Fans of the genre routinely rank it above Terraforming Mars for exactly this reason: it respects your time by making every turn matter.

Who should skip it: if the relaxed pace of Terraforming Mars was part of the charm — sinking into a long game where not every decision is a knife-fight — Underwater Cities may feel relentless. It is also drier thematically; there is no red-planet romance here, just a very good machine.

5. Wingspan — the friendly on-ramp to engine-building

Not everyone who admires Terraforming Mars enjoys sitting through it. If it was you — or, more often, your partner, your parents, the friends who bailed at the ninety-minute mark — Wingspan is the answer. Each bird you play into your habitats makes future turns stronger, so the core “my engine is compounding” pleasure of Terraforming Mars is fully intact. It just arrives in 40 to 70 minutes, with gentle rules and no direct conflict to sour the mood.

Wingspan is the game that has converted more skeptics into engine-builder fans than any other, and it is a genuinely elegant design, not a dumbed-down one — the tension between chaining bird powers and racing the round-end goals is real. Think of it as the gateway: play Wingspan to fall in love with the mechanism, then graduate up the list toward Ark Nova and Gaia Project when your table is ready for the heavy stuff.

Who should skip it: if you specifically wanted a heavier challenge than Terraforming Mars, Wingspan will feel like a snack, not a meal. It is the lightest game here by a wide margin — the right call for accessibility, the wrong one if crunch is what you are hunting.

What about solo play?

Terraforming Mars has one of the best solo modes in the hobby, so this matters. The good news: every game here plays solo. Ark Nova’s single-player challenge (a race against the “Arno” river track) is tuned and endlessly replayable and is the standout. Gaia Project and Underwater Cities both ship automated opponents that hold up well. If you want the Terraforming Mars solo puzzle in under an hour, Ares Expedition is purpose-built for it, and Wingspan’s Automa is a gentle, quick solo if you want to unwind rather than sweat. For a deeper dive, see our best 1-player board games roundup.

The bottom line

Start with Ark Nova — for most Terraforming Mars fans it is simply the better version of the game they already love. But be honest about which Terraforming Mars was yours: reach for Ares Expedition to keep the red planet on a weeknight, Gaia Project to go bigger, Underwater Cities to go tighter, and Wingspan to bring the whole table along. If your taste runs to the animal and ecosystem end of this genre, our roundup of the best board games like Ark Nova and our top nature and animal board games are the natural next stops. Heavy-strategy diehards should also browse our best long board games and games like Wingspan lists.

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