Tharsis: You roll the dice, you pay the price

[Deadpan]

Tharsis, a game about space being mean to you, is out today. I only heard of this a few days ago by way of a Let's Player

(the new normal of games media I guess) but my excitement immediately went through the roof. I like roguelikes, and I like games that portray space as a harsh environment, and this looks like a combination of both.

 

Most games obfuscate their random generation for the sake of immerson, but Tharsis wears its dice rolls on its sleeve: you send crewmembers to different places in the ship to take care of problems, you roll a certain number of dice and then use those to do various things.

 

More on this after I've had time to finally play a few rounds.

[Dewar]

A friend pointed out Tharsis to me after seeing a different, related, Youtuber playing and the marketing material on Steam looked pretty good. I just got a bunch of games in a charity bundle though, so I don't know if I'll be able to pick it up right now.

[Gwardinen]

It's pretty cool! I think the (hopefully) inevitable iOS port will be a big hit too.

 

I think my record so far is surviving 7 weeks, but that was by the skin of my teeth. No idea how anyone makes it through all ten.

[Dewar]

Initial reviews look kinda rough. Sounds like having the dice visible has a lot of people complaining about RNG balance issues.

[Deadpan]

I played it for a little bit now and made it to Mars twice, the first time was a pretty rough ride but the second time I had ship health to spare.

 

It's one of those things where early events can snowball pretty hard on you I guess. When you have lucky rolls and event generation early on, you might get a chance to devote one person to harvesting food or recovering dice for themselves, and then you can use those extra dice in the following turns to make more extra dice for yourselves, etc. etc. On the other side of the spectrum, if any of your crewmembers actually die during events, you are most likely screwed.

 

You can kind of play into the game's balance a little bit by leaving some minor events unattended in the beginning in favor of creating more resources for yourself, plus there is a way they introduce after a few turns for you to bounce back a little bit, although for my taste that is a pretty heavy-handed way of introducing a moral dilemma.

[Ninety-Three]

I tried this game and did not care for it. I felt like I was constantly running around putting out fires (sometimes literally), and as a result I never got to make any strategic decisions. "Two events and the ship is heavily damaged, guess I'll fix the events and repair the ship." "Uh-oh, three events this week, guess I'm going to spend the entire week doing repairs." "Two events again. But I'm out of food. So I've got to do repairs plus spend the rest of my time making food." My decision-making process went:

1: Fix events.

2: Fill up whatever bar (health, food, ship) is almost empty

3: Decide where to allocate remaining crew

Executing steps 1 and 2 wasn't interesting because it's like playing on autopilot, I almost never made it to step 3, and if I did that meant I was doing pretty well on resources in which case the "rich get richer" design of the game meant that I had already entered easy mode. I guess if you really enjoy doing probability calculations in your head, you could get into the nitty-gritty of the dice game, but I'm way more mathematically-inclined than most, and that does not sound fun to me.

 

Initial reviews look kinda rough. Sounds like having the dice visible has a lot of people complaining about RNG balance issues.

 

Funnily enough, I had some RNG balance issues, and they had nothing to do with the dice (which I felt were smoothed pretty well thanks to Research, Rerolls and Assist). Your crew's starting health and dice are random, the severity of all the events is random, the usefulness of the event's location is random, and with all that, the game's systems are a feedback loop designed to kill you for falling behind, or hand you an easy game if you get ahead.

[Jordan A]

I played a couple hours of this last night and today. I don't think it'll set the world of digital board games on fire but it's pretty neat.

 

Initially it feels like a lot of running around and playing whack-a-mole against the events but eventually you get a sense of what's urgent and what you can ignore or chip away at in favour of using your dice on other things. Unlocking new crew members is largely done by attrition, I guess, so you'll eventually unlock alternate crew even if you never have much success.

It is heavily luck based - you might get unlucky and it's really hard, you might also get unlucky and have it be really easy. It's only if you're lucky and hit a middling level of difficulty where it becomes fun. I agree with Ninety-Three about the starting dice, though - maybe an option where you can allocate how many dice each crew member starts with (from a limited pool) would be helpful?

 

There's a menu option for "Missions (coming soon)" so maybe that'll add something interesting. Crew upgrades would be nice.

 

 

 

(Also your crew have weird clay-faces, which I don't love.)

[Deadpan]

I've been playing it a bunch more yesterday and got up to a pretty consistent win rate on Normal and even a few victories on Hard. How annoying or dangerous events are and how useful their current location is to you in terms of maybe getting to use that module's special effect is totally random, but there are some micro-level strategic decisions in how to address those fires. One optimization I try to go for compared to what I saw in those Let's Plays for instance is that instead of figuring out my approach to events on the fly, I try to plan out the entire turn in advance.

 

Instead of always using the closest person to fix a problem, you can often take advantage of your Doctor's or Captain's special ability (the Captain's ability to give dice to people feels especially useful) by setting up groupings and either making them go first, before people run off to fix other things, or last, when people are crowded in a particular module. Of the modules that I want to go to, do any have Void or Injury dice? Then I might want to go there before using up my all my assists on comparatively harmless Stasis rolls elsewhere. Or sometimes the best solution to a problem isn't the direct approach, like putting low scoring dice into research instead of using them towards the repair score, or adding ship health instead of getting rid of a problem.

 

What you can and can't do in a round is limited by the game, but you don't have to just have to go from one fire to the next always.

[Deadpan]

Zach Gage apparently made a short video explaining some of the inspiration for the

. It's interesting stuff.