Build a subway system to connect the city’s districts and fulfill public projects—but make sure you have all the proper permits!
What Is Terminus?
Terminus is a subway-building game for 2 to 5 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 25 minutes per player. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $74CAD (about $55USD) for a copy of the game. Terminus has a bit of a steep learning curve but if your kids have patience for the ruleset you may be able to go younger than 14, but winning requires some long-term planning that can be trickier especially for new players. (I played with my almost-10-year-old and she was able to handle playing the game but didn’t score very well.)
Terminus was designed by Earl Aspiras and Thomas Volpe and published by Inside Up Games, with illustrations by Edu Valls.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Terminus Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. Some of the graphic design has changed, and some stretch goals have already been unlocked as of this writing that will upgrade various components.
Here’s what will come with the game:
- Main board
- Turn Order card
- Year marker
- 24 Development tiles
- 21 Demand tokens
- 15 Blueprints
- 12 Permits
- 8 Power
- 20 Construction
- 18 Advanced Upgrade tiles
- 35 Agenda cards
- 18 Project cards
- 50 Coins (25 $1, 10 $3, 10 $5, 5 $10)
- Scoring pad
- 5 sets of player components, each including:
- Player board
- Player marker
- Prime Hub
- Bonus Reward marker
- Capacity marker
- Cycle marker
- 32 Rails
- 8 Lobbyists
- 12 Station Discs
- Player Aid card
- 2 Build Upgrade tiles
- Direction marker (for Automa)
- 8 Double-Sided Automa cards
Kickstarter backers will also get 50 metal coins and 10 metal Terminus markers.
The main board has two parts: an “action loop” at the top of the board where players select their actions each turn, and a map of the city on the bottom half, a square grid with various spaces for tracks and stops over 7 different districts. The action loop is designed so that you move clockwise around 6 different spaces, with each space giving you access to various actions. It can be a little confusing to parse at first—your pawn goes on the white space, but the actions you may choose are connected to that space with various lines. Within the loop are spaces where the four different resources are stored in a market—it would be really nice to have some sort of dual-layered board or an overlay to keep them organized, because trying to keep them lined up neatly was a challenge!
The resources themselves were wooden cubes in the prototype, but in the finished game will be shaped tokens—orange construction cones, green lightning bolts, brown folders, and blue blueprints. The shaped resources will definitely be better for color blind players than the cubes, but it remains to be seen whether they will be easier or harder to line up in rows and columns.
The player boards store your stations, upgrade tiles, and various other components—these will be dual-layered boards, which will help keep the station disks organized. I’m guessing the lobbyist meeples will be smaller in the final game, because you definitely can’t fit all 8 of the prototype meeples in the space provided on the board (or on some of the project cards). There’s also room for up to 8 resources on your player board—again, the dual-layered board will be helpful for keeping these from sliding all over. While there aren’t a lot of large illustrations in the game—most of the graphics are icons and are specifically game-relevant information—I do like the diverse group of characters on the player boards.
All of the actions use iconography rather than text, which can be good for language independence but may take a little getting used to. Fortunately, there’s a reference book, and all of the development tiles, upgrade tiles, and project cards are numbered so you can easily look one up if you’re not sure what it does.
You will need a pretty big table to play this game if you’ve got more than 2 players—aside from the main board and the player boards, there are a lot of tiles and cards that are placed along the top edge of the board as well, so you need to account for a little extra space there.
How to Play Terminus
You can download a draft of the rulebook here. You can also try it on Tabletop Simulator.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points by building stops, fulfilling demand, and completing public projects and your private agendas.
Setup
On the main board, place the various resources on the spaces in the four markets. In a 2-player game, don’t use the darker spaces. Next to the main board, you’ll place the turn order card (tucked so that there’s one column per player showing), some randomly drawn development tiles and project cards (depending on the player count), the deck of agenda cards, and the six different types of upgrade tiles (the number of each also depends on player count). Also, draw and place one random demand token on each development tile.
Each player takes a player board and the components in their color, along with 2 agenda cards and two building upgrade tiles. Place your bonus marker on the top left in the bonus row. Place your prime hub (the tall cylinder) on the first space of the station track, and then fill the rest of the track with stations (disks). Place your capacity marker (raindrop) on the leftmost capacity space. Put your lobbyists on the space provided, and set your tracks off to the side. Place the building upgrade tiles in the two spaces at the lower right, face-down.
Choose one agenda to keep and place it face-down next to your board. Once everyone has chosen, reveal your other agenda card—the turn order is based on the agenda cards, from lowest to highest. Put your player markers on the turn order card in that order, with your cycle markers directly below them. (The first player space is the one closest to the board.) Shuffle the revealed agenda cards back into the deck.
In player order, each player places their prime hub on any empty plot (circle space) on the board.
Gameplay
Terminus takes place over three “years,” and during the year each player may go around the action loop up to three times at most before passing. The year ends after every player passes.
At the beginning of the year, you gain income based on the highest uncovered space on your station track. (In the first year, everyone just gains $12.) Then, you place your bonus token on any of the five bonus spaces and collect those resources, some combination of construction, power, permits, blueprints, and tracks. In years 2 and 3, you will also claim a bonus based on your turn order.
In turn order (based on the card—remember not to just go clockwise!), players take turns moving their player marker clockwise on the action loop to take a single action each turn. You must always move at least one space, but you may move as far as you want. Every time you go past the start position, you move your cycle marker down a space, and after your third cycle, you must pass and place your marker onto the first available turn order space (the sooner you pass, the earlier in turn order you will be for the next year).
I won’t go into all the details about every action on the board, but most of the actions require spending money or resources, as indicated on the board. Also, there are a few actions that are positioned between two of the spaces, with both colors—these can be taken from either of those two spaces. You can purchase blueprints, permits, and power from the market—the fewer that remain, the more expensive they are—and you can collect construction by taking all of the cubes from the leftmost available column. You may also buy tracks and place them into your supply. You can collect more agenda cards (up to 3 total).
Some spaces allow you to add a development tile adjacent to one of your stations and then place a lobbyist on it. Development tiles make your stops worth points, and if you have your lobbyist on one, it also gives you access to an additional action or a bonus effect when you take particular actions. Once a development is placed, there’s another action that lets you claim the demand token (for end-game points) if you have a stop in the matching district.
To build tracks, you’ll need to meet a few different criteria: you need a permit and 2 construction, plus tracks in your supply, and each plot that you build to must be filled, either by another player already or by a newly built station of your own. (You always build off one endpoint—your terminus—and can never branch or loop back to your own stops, like a game of Snake.) Each station you build costs a blueprint. It’s also important to note that you need to increase your capacity (by paying construction and sometimes power) to have access to more stations to build. When you connect to another player, you can continue building past that stop. You can earn two building upgrades by increasing your capacity: one allows you to build hubs (by stacking a station on top of another) and one lets you treat both ends of your line as a terminus so you can build in either direction.
Finally, there are some actions that allow you to move your lobbyists around, either among your supply, development tiles on the board, and your agendas. Your agendas are private scoring conditions, each with two tiers—you’re only eligible for the higher tier if you place a lobbyist on the card. You may also commit lobbyists to the project cards, which are public goals, but each card can only have two players on it. The more lobbyists you commit to a project, the more you can score, but you may never remove lobbyists from a project so plan carefully!
Play continues until every player has passed and their markers are all back on the turn order card. Then you will reset the cycle markers and start the new year, with everyone gaining income, taking bonuses, and receiving turn order bonuses.
Game End
After the third year, the game ends and players tabulate their scores.
- 1 point for each station adjacent to at least 1 development
- 2 points for each hub adjacent to 1 development
- 3 points for each hub adjacent to at least 2 developments
- Points for fulfilling projects where you have lobbyists placed
- Points for fulfilling agendas
- Points for demand tokens acquired
- 1 point for every $4 remaining
The highest score wins, with ties going to the player who has the fewest stations left on their player board, and then most money remaining.
Two-Player Automa
In a 2-player game, there will be one automa player—it uses a single automa setup card, plus the stations and tracks of an unused color. The automa essentially does two things. First, its player marker starts in one of the action spaces, and whenever somebody uses that space, they must pay an extra $1 to the bank and then the automa moves counter-clockwise one space.
Second, any time a player increases their capacity, the automa builds. It starts with a prime hub on one edge of the board, and will attempt to zig-zag across the board, sometimes building up to three stations at a time. If it runs into another player’s tracks it will attempt an alternate route, but that’s basically it.
Why You Should Play Terminus
Terminus is a game about planning ahead. Each move you make may require a few other actions to set up. Oh, you want to build some tracks here? Don’t forget you’ll have to build a station as well, so that will cost you a blueprint, so make sure to buy a blueprint. But, wait—there’s more: you don’t start the game with any capacity for additional stations, so you’ll need to increase that, and in order to do so you’ll need to collect some construction. Let’s say you figure you’ll go ahead and increase your capacity by several stations so you don’t have to spend more turns doing it later; now you need to make sure you have some power as well. Ok, great, with all of that done, let’s go build those tracks! Hmm, did you remember to keep some construction for the build costs? No? I guess it’s time to make another pass around the action loop.
If you make some mistakes—you bought too many blueprints, or not enough—then you can feel like you’re going around in circles. And since you’re limited to three times around that loop per year, you really want to make the most of each trip. The first time you play it, expect to make some errors, but when you manage to string together a series of actions that results in building several stops that fulfill one of your personal agendas, it’s extremely satisfying.
One of the things that makes Terminus a bit more punishing than other games is that there’s very little luck involved after the initial setup. The set of development tiles, public project cards, and demand tokens is randomized but static for the rest of the game. Each player has some randomly dealt agenda cards, and the opportunity to get two more. But aside from those random card draws, everything else that happens in Terminus is driven by the players themselves, and other than the single starting agenda card, everything is open information. You make decisions, and then you live with the results.
That can make Terminus pretty challenging if you’re more of a tactical player, making decisions based on the current board state, rather than a long-term planner. I was actually able to teach my 9-year-old how to play and she picked up the rules just fine, but she had a much harder actually scoring points. (Part of it was that she would just jump several spaces ahead in the rondel to the thing she wanted to next, without consideration for stopping along the way to pick up some resources she might need later on.) For people who love to analyze systems and plan several steps in advance, though, Terminus is excellent, although that can exacerbate the analysis paralysis problem if your players are prone to that.
There are still some tactics that come into play, though, particularly in terms of the resource markets. One key decision you have to make is how far along the action loop to travel each turn. You’re not restricted by where other players are—the only rule is that you only get 3 loops per year. If you jump ahead of the other players, you might be able to buy some resources while they’re still cheap, at the cost of skipping over some other potential actions. Or, if you lag behind a little, maybe somebody will spend the resources you need, refilling the market and bringing the price down.
The construction market is a little different—instead of paying money for them, you simply claim the first available column, however much is there, so you can get as many as 4 construction in one action if the market is full. That means that if I spend just enough construction to start a new column, the next player to claim construction will only get a single resource. Gotta be careful, though—that player could be me.
The lobbyists are another aspect of the game that feels new to me. You have a limited supply of 8 of them, and there are limited opportunities to move them around. If you’re the one to place a development tile, you get to place a lobbyist for free, giving you access to more actions, which is great. Otherwise, you can spend actions in two of the loop spaces to move lobbyists around—but each development can only hold two players. The other way to use lobbyists is on agendas and projects, and this is crucial: while you can still score the lower values of your agendas without lobbyists, the public projects can get you a lot of points, but only if you commit lobbyists to them. A private agenda may be worth anywhere from 2 to 5 points without a lobbyist, and up to 11 with a lobbyist (for the most valuable cards), while a maxed-out public project can be worth more than twice that. I’ve found myself committing too many of my lobbyists to the development tiles for the advanced actions, but then not having enough turns to get them back into my supply for the public projects.
I received the prototype a bit late so I haven’t had as many opportunities to play it, but I’ve tried it a couple times at 2 players and once at 4 players, and I have to say I much prefer it with 4. The automa is required at 2 players simply because there are certain objectives where it helps to have a third set of tracks on the board so you can make connections, and the automa is certainly pretty easy to run. However, it’s entirely predictable and kind of boring, so I’d generally prefer to have a live player making actual decisions if possible. I think the game can work at 2 players, but I would personally recommend having at least 3 players to get the full experience.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed by Terminus and I think it’s a nice combination of an action rondel and path-making. While the rules themselves aren’t too complex individually, there are a lot of different actions to learn the first time so it can be a bit intimidating. I feel like it’s one that will reward repeated play because there’s so little luck involved; the more experienced you are, the better you’ll be able to “read” the initial setup conditions and start forming your plans right from the start.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Terminus Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
