Customizing Mars Design Blog

Designing Custom Milestones and Awards

After dozens of plays of Terraforming Mars, we decided that the standard setup needed more variety. Over the course of three years, one pandemic, and hundreds of additional plays, we created a fully customizable experience – nearly infinite permutations of maps, milestones and awards, and global parameter bonuses. This post shares details of the design process for our custom Milestone and Award system.

The end result includes:

Read on to see how we got there!

Final laser cut punch outs from The Game Crafter

Design process

Standing on the shoulders of giants

It’s important to note other great work that has been done to add Milestone and Award diversity. In particular, @RobAntilles on BGG has created several new Milestone and Awards and has done his own milestone threshold tuning. @Hoogard on BGG’s Milestone and Award synergies matrix also took a stab at creating sufficiently varied sets of milestones and awards.

This project sought to build on top of these in a few ways:

  • Even more new milestones and awards, and refining the set to the best of the best

  • An easy randomization system that gives varied sets of milestones and awards, without relying on an app or spreadsheet. (Although you could still use one!)

  • Tuned milestone thresholds to account for expansions and to improve balance across both new and original milestones

New Milestones and Awards

Throughout the iteration process, our play group tested out new ideas for milestones and awards. Some of these were inspired by the official milestones (e.g. adding the Milestone equivalent of an existing Award), some by @RobAntilles’ work, and some original ideas. We even added Colonies- and Turmoil-themed milestones and awards.

Overall we added 32 new milestones and awards to the original 30 (including those from the Hellas and Elysium expansion). And check the end of this post if you want to see some that didn’t make the cut.

5 of the 16 new milestones

5 of the 16 new awards

Iteratively improving prototypes

While designing this system, we went through several iterations of prototypes.

The first milestones and awards were printed on small pieces of paper, folded in half to make them double-sided.

The second set of iterations used acrylic tiles that we had lasercut, with printed adhesive labels stuck to each side. The heftier components were much more satisfying to use, but still allowed for easy iteration by drawing over or replacing a label.

The third and final set of prototypes we had manufactured by The Game Crafter. These have a real “board game component” feel.

Paper Prototypes

Acrylic Prototypes

Final Prototypes

Tuning milestone thresholds

We tracked milestone and award picks over hundreds of gameplays, using a variety of player counts (mostly 3 to 4) and expansions. In particular, we used that data to iteratively tune milestone thresholds so that each milestone was roughly equally difficult to claim.

We didn’t just look at overall claim rate. This percentage can be skewed – what if a milestone was claimed more often because it was paired with more difficult milestones? Instead, we created a new scoring system based on ELO ratings. We had to devise a new multiplayer ELO rating to handle the multiple claimed milestones of each game, with a little additional weight to a milestone that was claimed first vs. third.

Over hundreds of plays, we tracked the ELO rating for new and original milestones, making more commonly picked milestones harder and vice versa. Overall, milestones on the original Tharsis board were harder than average, and milestones on the Hellas and Elysium expansions were easier than average.

Despite all this effort, every play group will use different expansions or will have a different metagame that might impact what tuning works best for them. That’s why, when producing a “final” prototype, we also made a batch of milestone adjustment stickers to make further modification easy.

We tracked which Milestones were claimed during each play test.
We used a custom multi-player ELO formula to tune milestone thresholds for balanced play.
Using a sticker to update the Planner milestone threshold.

Ensuring milestone and award variety

Certain sets of milestones and awards just wouldn’t make for a fun game because they are too similar or align too closely to a particular strategy.

To address these issues, we devised a double-sided tiling system that uses three mechanisms to ensure adequate variety:

  • Put very similar milestones and awards (like Builder and Contractor) on opposite sides of the same tile so they cannot be used in the same game

  • Use a color-coding system (colored circles) to disallow more than two of the same type of milestone or award to be used in the same game. For example, milestones based on tag counts (like Rim Settler, Spacce Cadet, Apprentice, etc.) all have the same colored circle, and no more than two should be used in a game.

  • Additional conflicts are settled by a numbering system: each tile receives a number, and matching or adjacent numbers are not allowed. For example, Industrialist and Powerhouse may serve similar strategies, and therefore have conflicting tile numbers.

Fine tuning the full system was a bit of a trial and error process with complex maps; the actual tiles are fairly easy to use, though, and you quickly get the hang of it!

These are too similar. They are on opposite sides of the same tile so they cannot be used in the same game.
Too many tag type awards make for poor variety. Only two milestones or awards of a given colored circle are permitted.
These serve similar strategies. Their adjacent numbers indicate they should not be used together.
We used a fairly complex mapping to figure this all out – but the end result is easy to use!

The complete system

The final system consists of:

  • Double-sided laser cut cardboard punch outs from The Game Crafter. The tile thickness is much more satisfying than the paper prototypes when randomly choosing milestones and awards!

  • 30 original + 32 new milestones and awards (plus a make-your-own tile!) that have been carefully selected and tuned (but can always be re-tuned)

  • A coloring + numbering system to ensure balance and variety when randomly selecting milestones and awards. This is easy to do without consulting an app!

See below for photos of the final results. If you’d like to order your own set of our “final prototypes”, check out The Game Crafter for Custom Milestones and Awards or Custom Everything (includes map and bonus tracks).

Left on the cutting room floor

Not every idea survived our play testing. Here are some of the many that got left out:

Milestones that required specific combinations of tags. It was difficult to find combinations of tags that was both interesting and appropriately difficult. Of these, “Patriot” was the most balanced, but still not good enough to make the final cut.
Awards that just didn’t work. Admiral (most colonies and trade fleets) was improved upon by Hegemon (most colonies and cities). Overachiever (most cards with two or more tags) was not very interesting or easy to track during the game. Justinian (most complete sets of green, blue, and event project cards) was almost always limited by events played, and so it added nothing over Event Manager (most events).
Negative awards (inspired by @RobAntilles) subtract VP instead of adding it. These added an aggressive interaction and actively dissuaded certain strategies. We were excited about this concept, but found that these reduced game variety and enjoyment during playtesting.