Board Game Comparison: Dune Imperium, Root, Terraforming Mars

Hello everyone!

Every year since 2005, my group of geek friends have an yearly meetup in July in which we spend a whole weekend playing games: we go to someone's house, sleepover from saturday to sunday, and spend both days gaming and chatting.

It has become some sort of ritual for all of us: we're now all adults, but we're still trying to keep doing it with it every year. We're flying from all over the country to just spend the weekend together and play.

This year, we had the pleasure to play three superb Board Games: Dune Imperium, Root and Terraforming Mars. All games are extremely solid, considering all three are at the top of BoardGameGeek's rankings. All games are extremely solid, considering all three are at the top of BoardGameGeek's rankings.

This post here will not talk about whether the games are good or not; after all, if they were bad, they wouldn't be at the top of the rankings. Any game in the BGG's Top100 is extremely good.

This post will compare these three games, and bring the perception that our group had after playing all of them one after the other.

Terraforming Mars

We found out that Terraforming Mars is the most newbie-friendly of those 3 games due the reason that it's a game with low interaction between players: new players get the opportunity to play their own game "by themselves", without being constantly punished by the rest of the table.

Terraforming Mars is almost a "Solitaire". Obviously it isn't, as there are interactive mechanics (putting tiles on the board, some cards that allow you to steal/destroy stuff from your opponents, and the whole draft). But each player can more-or-less play their own game without being disturbed.

Due the few interaction between players, it's also the most "casual" game: players can dual-task with other stuff while playing (chatting, doing something on their phones) without heavily impacting on the game.

Root

Root is the exact opposite of Terraforming Mars. Don't be fooled by the game's art, full of cute anthropomorphized animals like small bunnies and funny-looking raccoons. Everyone in the Enchanted Forest is a psychopathic and is willing to kill to amass more power.

Players need to step into that role. Everything you do in the game is automatically harmful to others: you kill other people's units, destroy their buildings, steal their cards.

Also, the game is deliberately unbalanced: some factions are objectively stronger than others. The game designers did this so that players have to balance each other: if someone is getting an advantage over others, the other players need to unite and kick the leader's ass.

As players have to keep each other in check, it's definitely not a casual game. A new player is usually rolfstomped the first few times playing it, as he doesn't really understand what's going on and how to contain the other players. And you NEED to pay attention to the game to see what each other player is doing, so you can counter it: so no chit-chat or browsing the web while playing.

Dune Imperium

We found out that Dune Imperium is kinda the middle ground between Terraforming Mars and Root: it has more interaction between players than TM, but less than Root; it is more cutthroat than Root, but less than TM; it's more complex than TM, but less than Root.

We enjoyed all three of those games, but Dune shined exactly because it was a competitive game in which we fought against each other, but it wasn't as ruthless and merciless as Root as those fights usually aren't direct, but indirect (eg worker placement on the board, or by denying cards that other players wanted).

Thanks for reading this post, and until next time!

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