In the interest of transparency, I received a complimentary copy of Mars Expedition: SOL43 for review purposes. This did not influence my assessment, and the opinions expressed here are my honest and unbiased reflections on the game.

I can’t think of many things that have globally captured the imaginations of so many people as space exploration.  You only must look as far as your nearest book seller (if any even exist around your neck of the woods) or the latest streaming and theatre trailers to see evidence of how ubiquitous stories of space faring really is.  The logic puzzle/board game Mars Exploration: SOL43 was born from this love as the designer, and his son, shared with each other the wonders of the red planet.

Read on to see how SOL43 differs from your normal board game and how it may to capture your space exploration passions.

One thing that I find difficult in doing these reviews has to do when I encounter text (either on components or a rulebook) that was may have had to have been translated to English from a different source language.  I speak no other languages and can only imagine how hard it is to translate writing from one language to another, without losing some context, feeling, etc. during translation.  This is probably even tougher when the content being translated is trying to explain or describe intricate instructions.  All that is to say, there are a few areas of the rulebook for Mars Expedition: SOL43 that stood out to me as needing some clarification.  I will touch on these further down in the gameplay section and I welcome anyone who might be able to clarify to leave a note in the comments!

Besides the few to-be-mentioned areas, the rulebook is extremely well done.  It contains plenty of pictures, annotated with arrows and speech bubbles, to illustrate the main points of the game.  I also love the fact that the rulebook is written as if the player is an actual Mars roving astronaut, pulling the player into the theme the game has wrapped itself in.

Component wise, players get a little bit of everything: plastic figures, cardboard tiles, cards of different sizes, and multiple boards.  The plastic figures come in two types: a red or white Drone that the player will be using to explore the red planet, and then two orange Tornadoes that will spawn in some of the later maps.  Speaking of maps, the game comes packed with 43 different maps (or SOLs as they’re called here), each printed on a two-sided card, called the Task Card.  One side describes to the player how to set up the SOL while the opposite side gives the player(s) a goal to meet during the SOL.  The other deck of cards is the Strategic Deck and is only used in the two-player version, which we’ll get into shortly. 

Next, we have some assorted cardboard tiles (Mountains, Rocks, and Photocells to name a few) that are going to be placed around the main board and act as either obstacles or objectives for your Drone.  Players will notice three tiles, made of opaque plastic rather than cardboard, that represent Geomagnetic Anomalies.  While these are placed out on the board similar to the cardboard tiles, they look awesome and have a significant influence on the game when players land on them.  There is also a small, black cylinder representing the substance Aerographene.  I’m not entirely sure what this cylinder is made out of, possibly some foam material, but once you read about it in the rulebook, I think you’ll appreciate that it is designed out of a different material than the other components in the box.

Lastly, there is an assortment of boards that you’ll be playing on.  The Main Board, representing Mars, is an 8×8 grid that will be used in every SOL you play.  Running across the top and left side of the board is a collection of symbols.  These symbols will be used in conjunction with each other when setting up the SOL to be played.  Additionally, there are 19 Anomaly Boards, much thinner than the main board, that will be used to transport a player when they are caught in a Geomagnetic  Anomaly.  These boards can look like a mix of spirals and other crazy geometric patterns, all swirling into a blackhole right in the middle of the board. 

The Wind Cube rounds out the components, listing the normal compass rose directions, but is only used in the two-player game.  All in all, the components do a great job of bringing the theme to life, allowing players to feel as if they are truly piloting a drone across the desolate, windy, landscape of Mars.  But how do players actually go about piloting the Drone, much less meeting each SOL’s objective?  Read on to find out!

Solo Setup & Gameplay

Mars Exploration: SOL43 treats its setup phase with a fairly novel idea, making it an actual part of the game.  When players choose the SOL they want to play out of the deck of Task Cards, their first task is to decipher the placement of the components.  Players will do this by looking at the symbols printed next to each component on the card.  For example, the first component might be for the Base tile and it might have an empty triangle printed next to it.  The player will scan down the left-side of the board looking for the triangle row, while also going across the top of the board to look for the empty symbol.  Once both are found, the grid space where this row and column intersect is the correct placement for the Base tile.

My first few times playing, I really enjoyed building out each map, one component at a time.  It was fun to finally finish it, look over the board and take in all that I was about to wade into.  Fast forward multiple plays, and maybe the novelty of it has worn off slightly as sometimes I’m impatient and just want to get to the playing.  But I will say that my nine-year-old is still in love with this aspect of the game so maybe the target for the setup “puzzle” is of a younger age than myself.

Once the board is loaded up with the correct components, it’s time to start exploring.  Players will look to the back of the Task Card to see what their current task is and will typically come coupled with an amount of moves that you’ll want to try to meet, or beat if you’re skilled enough.  These tasks differ but many of the early SOL tasks will have you leaving your Base, traipsing around Mountains and over Rocks to pick up some sort of mineral, and then return to the Base.  So, what’s the catch?  The catch comes in the form of how your Drone is allowed to move.  It can only ever move in an S-Curve.  This might look like your Drone moving one space north, one space east, and then one space north again.  Another example would be your Drone moving one space west, one space north, and one space west again.  In these early maps, Rocks and Mountains are plentiful and differ in that the Drone is allowed to fly over Rocks (but not land on) whereas the Drones have to fly around the Mountains.  These early maps give the player a great lesson in the nuances of the Drone movement but for me personally, there was maybe a bit too many maps at this difficulty level.

At SOL9, players will encounter a component that will return frequently for the balance of the 34 remaining SOLs: the Tornado figurine.  The Tornado starts as a stationary object but in later SOLs, it will begin to move in a circle, or back and forth in a straight line.  The Tornado lives to alter the course of those Drones who find themselves in their proximity.  The Tornado’s proximity radiates out from the space the Tornado sits, creating a 3×3 grid that it influences.  This influence comes in the form of extending the S-Curve for the Drones that fly in, or through, the orange cyclone.  With movements needing to be extremely efficient, the player will quickly start calculating how to best use the Tornado to get to his/her goal quicker. 

Unfortunately, the Tornado is where I have the most trouble in the rulebook.  For all its words and pictures on how the Tornado impacts your movement, I still can’t tell you what happens if you land on just the edge of the Tornado’s proximity.  This is confusing because if you Fly From these spaces and fly away from the Tornado, there is no impact to your flight path.  But if you fly into a space and stop, compared to flying multiple spaces deep into the Tornado (called Flying Over in the rulebook), what exactly happens?  Does it not extend the path just as if you had flown from that same spot?  This confusion really impacted my plays once the Tornado came into the game solely because I was always thinking, “if I’m playing this wrong, then that would mean I wouldn’t have extended by one space which also means that I would be here instead of there, and then I could get to the Base in the right amount of moves and…” You get the point.  It really caused me to wonder if there were SOLs that I was really stumped on or if I had interpreted the rules wrong and I was just playing wrong when it came to the Tornado.  So, to the designers, if this could be clearer in future editions, I think it’d help a lot!

But Tornadoes aren’t the only thing stopping you from collecting those minerals, eventually you will fly right into a Geomagnetic Anomaly.  These are the opaque plastic tiles mentioned in setup, and when you fly into it (no matter if you land on it or not), you are transported to one of the Geomagnetic Anomaly boards, matching the SOL number you’re currently playing.  The anomaly acts as a kind of secondary puzzle, forcing you to move a Pawn (because you don’t take your Drone into an anomaly) towards one of the exit Gates before being sucked completely into the blackhole that rests in the center of the board.  What I really appreciate with these is that it isn’t just another puzzle or maze for the sake of adding busy work in later SOLs.  Depending on what direction you pass into the tile from will determine which of the four Gates to start at.  Similarly, when you exit through a Gate, this will influence which direction your Drone is going to move out of the Geomagnetic Anomaly.  This is a really fantastic way to take this secondary puzzle and give you the choice of how to solve it so that it best influences the bigger puzzle (completing the SOL task) that you’re also playing. 

If you’ve read this far, you’ve noticed that I have mentioned “puzzle” or “maze” multiple times but I’ve skimped on the words “board game” throughout the article.  I would firmly put the solo version of Mars Expedition: SOL43 in the Logic Puzzle category.  The overall task is to set up a maze-like environment and then asks the player to use their smarts to get the objective completed as fast as possible.  That alone might turn a large population of gamers away but there are plenty of people out there who always need to be solving something, and Mars Expedition: SOL43 would be a great answer to this sect of gamers.  But what if you hate playing alone and you have a bunch of (or at least one) friends who are just begging to play a game with you?  Then you can still play SOL43 in it’s two-person, albeit inferior, version.

When I first read the description for Mars Expedition: SOL43, I couldn’t quite figure out how this was going to work with two players.  The answer to that ended up being in the Wind Cube and the Strategic Cards.  Five of these cards are dealt to both players at the beginning of the game and allows the players to give themselves an advantage or allows them to force a negative outcome on the opposing player.  Most of the cards sound like something you’d find in Iron Man’s workshop but for all I know, they are real things.  Chronometric Lens, Aerographene Oddities, and my favorite: Einstein Bridge to name a few.  These cards gave a fun “take-that” spin to a game that felt clinical in the solo mode.

So far, so good, right?  But remember, I said “inferior version” earlier, and this is where the Wind Cube rears its big head.  At the beginning of each turn, the dice chooses a direction printed on one of its sides.  The Drone of the active player is then pushed one space in the direction that was rolled.  So, this was probably intended as a way to minimize both players from just following the same path as that wouldn’t be much fun.  The problem for me is that while the cards added a fun thrill to the game, the roll of a dice moving my Drone around was just maddening.  There were multiple times that the wind pushed me into a corner, with a Mountain perfectly positioned so that I couldn’t actually leave the corner.  What do I do then?  Just give up?  This is also a place where the rulebook left me wanting more.  The Wind Cube adds so many variables to the mix, it would be impossible to answer every single “what if?” in the rulebook, but much like the Tornado, if I’m not sure that I’m playing a game like this correctly, it puts a damper on the whole thing.

Conclusion

I’ve always been a person who liked solving logic puzzles.  I have multiple books of those Logic Grid Puzzles, where there are columns and rows and you get hints like “Doug’s last name isn’t Jones but he sat to the left of the girl with a ribbon in her hair.”  Then you have to put an X or O in the boxes until you find out that his name is Doug Anderson, wore a baseball cap, and was sitting to the left of Marie Martin.  Ok… sorry about that but what I’m trying to say is, a game like Mars Expedition: SOL43 ticks a lot of logic puzzle boxes for me.  But being in that sort of niche will probably mean that a lot of board gamers will pass it by because they won’t feel it has much “game” in it.  While I applaud the try at making this work with two players, that part of the game fell flat for me, but I had a lot of fun with the solo portion.  Not only is it a really fun puzzle that my brain could dive into, I could feel the love and passion poured out to bring this to life by the designer. 

Ratings are based on 5 main criteria: rulebook, setup, components, art & graphic design, and gameplay.  The first 4 criteria are rated 1 to 5 and the gameplay is rated 1 to 10.  These scores culminate in an “overall satisfaction” score that is rated from 1 to 10.  If the reviewed game has both a solo and multiplayer mode, I have assigned scores separately to give context to which mode we enjoy more.