Pocket Mars is a fast paced and wildly dynamic card game but don’t let the short playthrough time fool you. It’s a heavy weight filler ! A compressed and easy to understand set of rules, combined with cards that you can play in more than one way is what makes this game great !

Your goal is to place as many colonists as you can in the buildings of your Mars settlement. To do so, you will need to choose carefully how and when to play your cards. The way you trigger actions on your cards is the heart of the game. Everything depends on where you play them from, which is the game’s main strategic element.
You could play a project card straight from your hand and trigger its effect instantly or turn it into a module and play it from your preparation zone. This will let you add it to one of the five buildings in your settlement, trigger an action sequence and transport your colonists to Mars – a sure way to put a spanner in the works of your competition. Each card’s set of various actions combined with the buildings’ unique properties leaves you with a number of small but substantial decisions :

– Where to put your card.
– Where to play your card from.
– What action sequence will give you the most possibilities within a given turn.

What’s more, anyone can activate an action from a module placed in one of the buildings by another player and share its effects.
Pocket Mars may be a small game but Michał Jagodziński sure stuffed it with a lot of options that will have an impact on the survival of our civilization !