Board Game Arena

Suppose you have nothing better to do than Mining Area in the early game, no one has played a tile on the board yet, and you would like that titanium production early. Do you:

A. SP City, then Mining Area
B. SP Greenery, then Mining Area
C. Pass and wait to play it in a later gen
D. Should not have bought Mining Area in the first place

Been seeing a few opponents do (A) lately. I've been doing (B) myself. And while (D) is probably the correct answer, sometimes you draw into Mining Area and find yourself in the initial situation I outlined.

This is in 2P; if player count matters.

SP city for it is 99,5% wrong. You are blocking yourself a spot of greenery, paying 25 cash for 1 mc prod. The tempo on it is horrendous.

SP Greenery... Maybe if you have some other plays with it or your starting hand is THAT horrendous and you just need SOMETHING to get going. Ecoline trying for another convert with greeneries (you obvi go for 2 plants for ur greenery here) comes to mind or Credicor due to the SP rebate (probably greenery on the card, since your starting hand sucked). Still is a very heavy investment, so should be thought about heavily.

I would mostly go with C, but depends on the draft overall. There are plenty of tile placement cards in the game and mining area offers building tags, the cheapest titanium prod (if you go that route) and down the line a Landlord tile.

2 player (which I play the most) SP city is terrible play agreed. That said I wouldn't say 'you should not have bought mining rights'. Unless the game ends in a few gens, mining rights is fine. You can hope for another tile to enable it (restricted area, nuke zone, etc.).

Best wishes.

For 2p, I think you should generally buy mining area in the opener unless it prevents a critical gen 1 play. You're likely to get good use out of it at some point.

SP city is virtually never correct. I'd say the decision between SP Greenery and Pass typically comes down to how many other plays you have / how much money you have. If you have literally nothing else to do, didn't buy many cards, and aren't an ultra-poor corp, it's worth considering. Ofc if you're credicor, it's a much better investment.

I'm not at all an elite player, but I really enjoy playing Terraforming Mars. This exact situation just came up for me in a async game I'm playing. I had both Advanced Alloys and Mining Area fairly early on. I chose to SP greenery to play it. The game isn't over yet, so we'll see how well it works.

Mining area is a tricky one, if I have a card that places a tile its an insta buy of course. If I draft it in my opener and I cant play it right away I take it depending on what my game plan is. If I think im going to be playing cities and greenery throughout the game i'll draft it if I can afford it. If I think im going to be playing a game where i'm not playing cities and greenery(which some games that is the case). Then ill let it slip through, a lot of time you don't ever get to play it and the 2 ME you lose out on early can actually be a really big deal and in the long run lose you a lot more than 2 ME. Definitely a really strong card , you do need context for it to be played though, it is not a card that you click on no matter what without thinking.

Side note, almost never barring very special circumstances am I playing a SP city early game to play mining area.

In most case, I will pass or skip this mining area. I think SP city is a very bad move here, at least it's worse than SP greenery.