Realized I had shuffled my Terraforming Mars deck wrong for almost 2 years

Last Sunday during a game night, a buddy pointed out that I had been mixing the corporate era cards with the base game cards like they were the same deck. Turns out I ruined the balance on every single play since I picked up the expansion back in 2021. The card draw was always way too random and felt off, but I just shrugged it off. Has anyone else found a basic rule or setup mistake that totally changed how a game plays once you fixed it?

2 comments

2 Comments

maxm504d ago

That thing you said about "making everything a wild card draw" really hits home. Once you know the intended balance, it's wild how much smoother the game plays, right? So tell me this: after you fixed the Catan Cities and Knights deck, did the strategy for that expansion finally click for you the way you thought it was supposed to? Or did it make you realize you had been playing a completely different game for three years without even knowing it? I'm always curious if fixing the rules makes people enjoy the game more or if it just makes them mad about all the time they wasted playing it wrong.

flores.tessa4d ago

I was actually reading about this exact thing on a board game forum last week, and someone pointed out that shuffling the wrong cards together totally breaks the intended balance of Terraforming Mars because the corporate era cards have way more powerful effects that are supposed to be mixed in slowly over time. Like, the whole point of the expansion is to add variety without making the game feel like a random mess, but you basically bypassed that by making everything a wild card draw. I feel your pain though, I did the same thing with the Cities and Knights expansion for Catan where I was using the wrong number of progress cards for like three years. It makes you wonder how many other games we are all playing slightly wrong without even knowing it.