Terra Mystica

06/2017 I was really excited to see this get ported to Steam. I was tempted to get it for Tabletop Simulator, but I didn't feel like managing all the bits, and I would have liked an AI to play against. The good: It's Terra Mystica with the rules enforced, no fiddling around! AI to play against! The bad: The interface the interface and the interface. Oh. My. [strike]God[/strike] Eyes. Seriously, this looks like it was directly ported from an [strike]iPad[/strike] iPhone, with the graphics scaled up proportionally (though thankfully done in higher resolution). Everything is HUGE. It's like playing with binoculars strapped to your face. I can't do it. I just can't. I have to move my laptop 5 feet away just so I can make a menu choice, everything is so in my face. And then it zooms back out to the map, so I have to get close to the laptop again. This isn't such a big deal because I happen to keep my laptop on a conveyor belt, but I'm wearing out the backwards/forwards buttons FAST! Basic tile selection that you can do easily wiith a physical copy is impossible because everything is 4 times as big as it needs to be. Glancing at 5 inches of bonus tile choices becomes scanning across 14 inches screen. Choosing your starting race involves scrolling through fist sized icons of race portraits. Look at your fist. Just look at it. Thats how big the icons are. WHY??? I just can't recommend the game currently as it is. Do yourself a favor and look at some screen shots, full sized, and get an idea of what you're going to be in for.

Alright if you already play Terra Mystica, yes, this is way better than what we have currently for online gaming. The interface is solid, although things are a little clumped and you need to do some clicking and open some menus. But since it's terra mystica, that's like a given. As a big time terra mystica lover, I am trilled to find this game. If you DON"T know what Terra mystica is, it's one of the most heavy borad games out there. It is praised for it's depth and complexity, a boardgame that incorporate a lot of boardgames mechanics such as worker placement, resource management, terrtorial dispute, timing, etc. It's a really well done board game. Problem: if you don't enjoy heavy and in depth board games, don't bother with this. Please leave. This ♥♥♥♥ ain't Settlers of Catan, although it may look like it at first glance. My friends complained to me that this is worse than doing taxes when I tried to teach them this. One of them rather do his CS homework than play it. Explanation: Terra mystica isn't so much as complicated than it is dense. There is a lot of mechanic and stuff that you have to know about. None of them is difficult to understand, it's jsut that there is a lot. The real issue is that every turn your action seems compleatly arbitrary. You will start off not knowing what you are suppose to do. There seems to be so many ways to get points, so many ways to make reasources, etc etc. But that's the whole strategy of it. The entire game is based aroudn coming up with a plan during the set up, and know how you can maximize your points while growing your economy. Knowing where to compete and where to spend reasource in order to disrupt opponent. It is a really well made game in the sense the strategies are truely fun to solve. Again, this is meant for people who love games because they enjoy learning as part of the process and solving the startegies. Lastly, you know what is really amazing. This game has zero luck factor. Okay well maybe 5%. It is all in the set up. You see what the tiles for points and passing bonuses are, and the rest is all up to playe decisions. No dice, no RNG, no bulls*it, ALL SKILL.

I've never reviewed a game on Steam before, but Terra Mystica is my favorite board game of all time and this implementation is absolute garbage. I can not come up with words to adequately express how much I absolutely loathe this version. This isn't an overly complex game, but there are a lot of different mechanics to keep track of. This version hides almost all of the relevant information in secondary screens. Want to know how much income that trading post will give you or where you stand on the cult tracks? Well, then you've got to click through and watch some awkward and annoyingly slow animations bring up those screens. A better example, might be upgrading a trading post to a temple. In TM, getting a temple means you gain a favor tile. Favor tiles give you special abilities or points bonuses and also advance you on the cult track. In order to choose the right favor tile, it's important to know where you are on the cult tracks, if you have the right structures to trigger the bonuses, and what your income for future rounds will be. The latter is the only thing displayed all the time; everything else is hidden. Even more infuriating is that accessing those secondary screens often cancels whatever action you've just selected. A typical temple upgrade might go something like this: 1. Click hex with trading post 2. Click green check to upgrade 3. Favor tile selection screen pops up. 4. Click cult screen. Cancels action. 5. Repeat 1-3 6. Realize you need to know what the later round bonuses will be to make your decision. Click on the round bonus screen [cancels action]. 7. Repeat 1-3 8. Pick a favor tile. All that complexity for something that should be straightforward. That's pretty much how the whole game plays. Just find some friends to play with in real life instead.

2024年购买，官方已经在2023年底修复了很多bug，包括之前的中途退出AI会失灵的问题，含有冰火扩一共20种族和4张地图，有快进功能，游戏流畅度提升了很多，单机玩一把不到半小时

First, I want to say that Terra Mystica is one of my favourite board games. However, this version might be ok for tablets and devices with a small screen, but for a PC monitor its just infuriating. Everything is way too big and all the relevant information is hidden on secondary screens. That makes you click everywhere to get the stats you need to make the right decisions for the game. If you can choose a reward, you can't access game information as it cancels the current action. The same slow animations for every turn.. a horrible user experience. I wish there would be an update for the PC-version with the needed graphics update everyone here is talking about. But since there are no more updates here, nor any discounts on steam sales do yourself a favour and skip this. I hate to say it, but I absolutely regret to spend ~15 € on this. It could have easily been much better.

TL;DR 4/10, unclear/not fully encompassing tutorial, buggy, and unattractive digital board game. Pros: + The game itself has potential + Different theme music for each class + deep strategy Cons:
 + Terrible tutorial + Rampant spelling and grammatical errors + Extremely limited options menu + Many bugs/errors I was very disappointed with this game. I bought this with no prior knowledge of the board game, but am an avid digital board gamer so I thought I’d give it a go. The tutorial is not only confusing and not fully encompassing, but it’s filled to the brim with spelling and grammatical errors which was really distracting for me. The options menu is extremely limited, giving you only the possibility of full volume sound or muting. In addition to this, the AI player speed options are only slow, medium, and fast, not terrible, but certainly not ideal. The game is the definition of too much. The various menu’s you must use for gameplay are VERY busy and overwhelming looking. I understand that with a deeply strategic game there is a lot going on and it can be difficult to simplistically convey that to the player, but this is plainly not the way to do it. The number of completely separate windows you have to open on a single turn is really cumbersome and takes away from the enjoyment of the game. This game is still new, which means it has the possibility of being improved, so I will keep checking up on it to see if it gets any better. For now, would not recommend.

I'm a fan of the board game so I thought I'd give this a try, and if it's good get some extra copies for friends so we can play this excellent game remotely. I was shocked by the user interface. It may have been the worst I have seen in 40 years of gaming. Also all information is so poorly presented, that it makes it hard to even understand what you're doing. At first I was trying to convince myself that I might get used to it, but when I was prompted with the "action wheel", I thought "ok, that's it, I'm out". Mind you, that's as someone who actually knows how to play the game. I have played an online browser adaption that is 100 times better than this. This is sadly the worst boardgame-to-digital conversion that I personally have come across so far.

I see a lot of petty complaints about the UI, but here's the thing: When a computer is automating all the time-consuming fiddly bits of an otherwise fantastic board game, I am totally willing to forgive a slightly weird interface. Yes, it's a mobile port, and very obviously so. Yes, you have to learn how to perform certain functions that are not terribly intuitive. But guess what -- once you learn them, they become second nature and it's not an issue anymore. You can act like a know-it-all prat who could design a better interface in his sleep, or you can settle in and enjoy a really good game in half the time it would take to play the tabletop version. PLEASE NOTE: This is the only DIGIDICED game I'm willing to be lenient for. All their other games are full of bugs and unfinished features and, yes, terrible interfaces. Every single one. The reason TM gets a pass is because it is the least bad DIGIDICED game in each of those categories. So I totally get why the reviews are mixed, but I still have to recommend because it's a reasonably playable adaptation of an extremely good board game. Terra Mystica is a truly unique game. It's deep and complex, with a lot of moving parts and multiple paths to victory, not to mention asymmetrical factions. It's a real shame there are so many whiners giving it the red thumb because they think the interface is all there is to a game.

I understand why you can not chose which factions to play when doing multiplayer but why not when playing local?? Makes no sense. If I want to try out a faction, there is no way to do it.

Terra Mystica is my favorite board game so far. The two main appeals with Terra Mystica, for me, are that nothing is based on luck - it's all strategy; and that the re-playability is quite high because of the different civilizations to choose from and the different possible mission turn-orders. However, this game is not quite there yet in terms of controls or UIX. First of all, the controls are not great: The short-hands are not intuitive, the only way to reverse a command (as far as I can tell) is to "restart" your own turn which is a small nuisance, and the game forces you to observe what happens in real time with your opponents — preventing you from reading up on other gameboard elements while the opponents make their moves. A simple events log could have prevented this pretty annoying feature being forced on the player. Secondly, The general main goal of each game varies, but the graphical representation of the game's main goal does not vary. This means that even though the main goal is to have as much power represented in buildings on the board as possible, the representation in the game will still be that of the largest contiguous city. To make matters worse, there is no information shown whenever players hover their cursors over these goals. Such easy fixes for such idiotic mistakes could, and should, have been made before launch (which was quite some time ago, I may add). Thirdly, the UIX is horrible over all. If you accidentally click your way into the game menu during a game, there is no straightforward way of backing out of it: There is not undo/reverse button to take you back, there is no shorthand command to take you back, and, again, there is no tool-tip shown when hovering your cursor over the different menu options, forcing you to make a guess at what will happen depending on where you are now forced to click even though you never meant to access this menu to begin with, or perhaps you were just exploring the different controls while your opponents were playing. Either way, this often times forces you out of LAN games/AI games, that you will have to jump back into, since this was seen by the developers as a much smoother progress than simply having a "reverse choice" option in each menu. If you really love Terra Mystica, the game might be worth your time as it is...well, Terra Mystica. However, be careful where you click during gameplay. I would strongly suggest getting yourself acquainted with all controls and menus during an AI game, so that you do not run into any of these issues when attempting to connect the ultimate unicorn that is an actual online game (Nobody plays online in open games). The odds are that your average Terra Mystica Player, maybe even a large number of fans, would feel disappointed in this version of the game, so I would suggest you look elsewhere for your online Terra Mystica needs. Overall, or TL;DR: this game was not really worth my time or money, even though I love the original board game, and I would assume the same will be true to the average YOU, out there.