Tharsis is a turn-based strategy game about the first crewed mission to Mars, and it wants you to understand two things before you press start: space is indifferent, and dice do not care about your plans. Developer Choice Provisions built the game around simulated virtual dice, a damaged ship called the Iktomi, and a ten-week countdown to a planet that may be sending a signal nobody can explain. It came out in January 2016 for Windows and Mac OS X through Steam, plus PlayStation 4, and reached the Nintendo Switch in April 2020. It scores 6.3 out of 10.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Zach Gage and the Iktomi
Designer Zach Gage and the indie studio Choice Provisions made Tharsis to mimic a board game, and that intention shows in every screen. You control four astronauts, each with a unique job and abilities, inside a spacecraft that a micrometeorite storm has already wrecked. Two crew members, Mapiya Musgrave and J. Cross, are dead before the game properly begins. The Pantry, where the food was stored, is gone. Mission Control is still on the line, and Mission Control cannot bring anyone home.
The setup is grim and specific. Earth picked up a mysterious signal from the Tharsis region of Mars, scientists decided it looked extraterrestrial, and humanity built a ship and sent six people to investigate. Halfway there, the storm hits. What follows is ten in-game weeks of patching holes, feeding people, and watching stress meters climb.
Dice, Assists, and the Hull
Every turn, at least two parts of the ship have a problem that needs fixing. Left alone, those problems damage hull integrity or crew health. You click an astronaut, send them to a module, and spend their dice to match the number the repair demands. Fail to hit the number after everyone has moved, and the negative effect fires.
Each astronaut carries health points, a stress meter, and a dice cache. Here is the mechanic that defines the whole game: every roll permanently shaves one die off that character’s maximum unless you replenish it with food. Your best tool is also your most finite one. Hazards can block rolls, and only assists clear them. You can hold three assists at a time, and each hazard you cancel eats one.
Rooms carry bonuses you trigger by rolling a specific die or combination. Spare dice can go into research, banking abilities for later. It is a tight, legible economy of scarcity, and it works.
Side Projects and the Cannibalism
At the end of each week, the crew takes on side projects you choose from a menu. Most carry a positive effect and a negative one. The higher a character’s stress, the worse the downside gets. Push someone into insanity and they pursue a solo project with a far more drastic result, possibly at the expense of the other crew. You can also eat, if there is food.
The marketing line for Tharsis has always been blunt about this: a turn-based space strategy game with dice and cannibalism. The game earns that. When the Pantry is gone, the question of what the crew will consume stops being rhetorical, and Tharsis does not flinch from it. This is not a horror game that hides its worst idea in a cutscene. It hands you the decision and makes you live in the consequences for the rest of the run.
A Copy of the Crew
The story threading through the mechanics is stranger and better than the premise suggests. As the Iktomi limps toward Mars, the crew deciphers data coming from the signal. It appears to show an exact copy of the Iktomi’s own crew, and that copy is in dire straits. The game never resolves what that means with any comfort.
The ending splits on who survived. Reach Mars with one or more crew dead, and an alien artifact flashes bright light and compels the survivors to detach their helmets and suffocate. One crew member lasts long enough to send a distress call, and the artifact sends that call back in time, closing a causal loop. Bring everyone home alive and the commander declares the mission accomplished while advising Earth not to expect survivors. A crew member throws a rock at the artifact before it activates, destroying it in a massive explosion, and Mars is seen under a layer of something the game leaves hanging.
Depending on which characters you field, the commander’s voice is either male or female. That is the whole of the game’s characterization budget, and it is the right call. Tharsis is not interested in who these people are. It is interested in what they will do on week nine.
Where the Dice Betray You
Critics split hard on Tharsis, and the split was not about presentation. It was about whether the game rewards deep strategy or simply buries you under random chance. That argument has never really been settled, because both sides are describing the same design.
The dice cache is the tell. Because every roll permanently reduces a character’s maximum dice until you spend food to restore it, the game converts randomness into a resource drain. A bad roll does not just fail a repair. It makes every future roll slightly worse. Stack enough of those and the run is over, and no amount of clever module assignment can pull it back.
That is a real strategic texture, and it is also a cruelty. Tharsis asks you to plan around probability, then punishes you for the probability you could not plan around. The assists system softens this — you can hold three charges at a time, and one is consumed per hazard — but three charges at once is a thin cushion across ten weeks.
The game was received more poorly by video game reviewers than by streamers, board game players, and other developers. That gap is worth sitting with. People who came to Tharsis expecting a video game wanted agency. People who came to it expecting a board game understood that the dice are the point, and that losing to them is a legitimate outcome.
What Tharsis Gets Right, and Where It Loses the Thread
The Iktomi is a good ship to be trapped on. Ten weeks is a clean, legible structure, and the two-problems-per-turn floor keeps pressure constant without ever feeling arbitrary about pacing. The research system gives spare dice somewhere useful to go, which matters in a game where every die is a decision. The side projects are the strongest idea here: most trade a benefit for a cost, and stress scaling means the cost grows exactly when you can least afford it.
The Pantry being destroyed in the opening is a smart piece of design. It removes the safety valve before the player has learned to rely on it, so food scarcity reads as a premise rather than a difficulty spike. Cannibalism stops being a provocation in a press release and becomes a line item in your weekly planning.
The causal loop ending is the best thing in the game. It is genuinely unsettling, it recontextualizes the data the crew spends the journey decoding, and it does not explain itself. Tharsis is confident enough to leave the artifact’s nature unresolved, and that confidence is earned.
The problem is that Tharsis is a strategy game with a strategy ceiling, and the ceiling is lower than the theme deserves. Once you understand the dice cache and the assist economy, the optimal play narrows fast. You are managing attrition, not making interesting choices. The modules, the bonuses, the research tree — they all funnel toward the same answer: protect the dice, spend the food, survive to week ten.
Four characters with unique jobs and abilities sounds like a roster. It plays like a set of slightly different dice pools. The commander’s voice being male or female depending on your lineup is the only narrative variable the game offers, and it is a thin one in a story this strange.
The ending’s split is also its own kind of letdown. Most players will see the suffocation version, because most players will lose somebody. The causal loop is the reward for failure, which means the game’s best moment is also its most common one, and the full-survival ending — commander declares success, advises Earth not to expect survivors, a rock destroys the artifact — reads as the lesser payoff.
The Score, and What It Means
Tharsis is a good idea executed with real discipline and a hard ceiling. The board game mimicry is not a gimmick; it is the whole architecture, and the dice cache is one of the sharper attrition mechanics in the genre. The Iktomi is a memorable setting, the ten-week structure is clean, and the causal loop ending is the kind of thing most games never attempt.
But the strategy flattens once you see it. The unique jobs do not differentiate enough, the side projects carry the weight the characters should, and the randomness that gives the game its tension also caps how much skill can matter. The reviewer-versus-streamer gap is not a mystery. A streamer gets a story out of a bad run. A player looking for a strategy game gets a run they could not have saved.
That is the trade Tharsis makes, and it is a fair one for the right person. If you want a board game that will hurt you, this is it. If you want a strategy game where planning wins, look elsewhere.
The Numbers
- Title: Tharsis
- Developer: Choice Provisions
- Designer: Zach Gage
- Released: January 2016 (Windows, Mac OS X via Steam, PlayStation 4)
- Nintendo Switch release: April 2020
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), iOS, Mac, Wii U, Nintendo Switch
- Genres: Puzzle, RPG, Simulator, Strategy, Turn-based strategy, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board Game
- Modes: Single player
- Critical score: 6.3/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 7 outlets)
How a Run Breaks Down
The order here matters, because Tharsis punishes the wrong sequence harder than it punishes a bad roll.
- Deploy astronauts to damaged modules and spend their dice to hit the required number.
- Clear hazards with assists before they block your rolls — you can hold three at a time, and each one you spend is gone.
- Trigger room bonuses with the right die or combination where you can.
- Bank leftover dice into research for abilities you will need later.
- Feed the crew to restore dice cache, because every roll permanently shaves your maximum.
- Choose side projects at week’s end, weighing the benefit against the stress-scaled cost.
- Watch the stress meters. Let a character go insane and they take a solo project with a far worse result.
Get the order wrong and the ten weeks get shorter. Get it right and you still might lose the crew to a signal nobody can explain.
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