Board Game Review- Terra Mystica

  Terra Mystica is a territory control-style board game for 2 to 5 players. In it, you play as a race of magical beings who are attempting to terraform the planet through mystical means to suit there own habitats (i.e. Mermaids into water, Elves into forest). Hence the name Terra Mystica. In order to achieve this, the players have to manage the resources of money, divine priests, energy and buildings.

  Terra-Mystica is played out on a hexagonal board, each split into one of six different terrain types. Each race can then use various amounts of resources to terraform the landscape, build houses and then try to upgrade the buildings into churches, fortresses and the like.

 What actions you can do during your turn governed by how many of all the different types of resources you have at your disposal. There is never enough resources to do everything that you want to do. It makes it imperative to plan out what you want to try to do and then work towards getting the resources you need to complete this strategy. This is both the greatest strength and biggest weakness of the game. There are so many different resources to manage and keep track of that the game can often slow down just so each player can fully assess their options.

 There is also no direct way to interact with other players. The most you can do is try to spoil their plans by getting resources before them. There is no trading of resources between players or a way to directly attack them. This gives the player interactions a very negative feeling as opposed to any feeling of positive satisfaction or gain between the players.

Another problem is the downtime between turns. With no direct ways to interact between players and some turns taking a long time due to the amount that you need to keep track of, it is very easy to lose interest when it isn't your turn. This is worsened when you can't do many actions compared to other players (due to lack of resources) so you are often left just waiting.

 Overall, Terra-Mystica is a game with allot of potential. I do have to mention that the board and all the components look stunning and the theme is nicely woven into the game. However, for too many games I was struggling to stay interested except for the brief time that it was my turn. It may work better with only 2 or 3 players, which I haven't tried yet, but that may run into the problem of no interaction between players as the territories are too spread out. With all the competition with better territory and resource management games, I would give this a miss.

 1.5 out of 5 mystical waffle landscapes.