Terraforming Mars 3D

Terraforming Mars is a board game where the player cooperate for the Terraformation of Mars. Every player receive projects cards they can buy, then develop, which will help terraforming Mars. Other actions are also possible, like developing a forest, creating an ocean or building a city.

There are 3 common goals:

1. Augment the average temperature to 8°C 🌡️
2. Augment the O2 level to 14% 🍃
3. Create sufficiently many oceans (9 tiles). 🌊

When all these 3 goals are reached, the games stop. The winner is the one with the most “prestige points”. You get these prestige points by helping to fulfill one of these 3 goals or by other means (detailed on the cards).

Creating an ocean, a forest or a city allows you to place a tile on the Mars (on the board). Some position gives you bonuses. Other cards also allow the player to place special tiles, with specific abilities.

Progressively seeing the evolution of the Terraformation on Mars is a very nice feeling, giving the impression that you slowly help create a livable planet. However, the tiles of the game are made with “cheap” cardboard, and there is a real potential of improving those tiles, and the board by creating 3D printed tiles !
I am not the first person having this idea, many projects exist on the web, one of those really caught my attention. This design is really nice and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I decided to slightly modify it.

The only thing I did not like about the original design are the oceans tiles, I redesigned the tiles and used Epoxy resin (+ powder color) inside the tiles to give a nice water look.

I also decided to add magnets inside the tiles, because plastic tiles are really light, so without the magnets, they wouldn’t be stable on the board of the game and on their custom storage plate.
Adding these magnets consists in adding a hexagon with the hole of the size of the magnets (+tolerances). One has to pause the 3D printer at a specific layer height to be able to place the magnets inside.

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash