An interactive euro of network building
🚉Terminus is a competitive euro game for 1-5 players about building an underground transportation network. This is quite a balancing act as you want to meet the demands of the city, take part in different projects and developments, stick to your agenda and generally have your stations and rails in the most optimal locations.
Players are rival companies each building their networks from scratch. Everyone moves around the action loop 🚇 to perform actions - a rondel (which fittingly resembles a metro line) depicting all the possible things to do. Instead of restricting the movement like you normally see with rondels, here you can jump clockwise anywhere you want, however ☝️ you can only do 3 full cycles before your round ends. Actions are also bunched up into 6 zones, and you can only choose to do a single action in a zone. So often you won’t be able to do some important things and have to wait another cycle.
Resource management is a central element of the game. 🧐 Resources are acquired from a central supply. The more tokens missing from the supply, the more expensive they get. Players also have limited storage capacity for 8 tokens so you cannot really stock up. Getting resources and not running out of money is a constant struggle. You could easily run out of money on your first or second cycle in the loop, and then not really be able to get anything done. 😱
🏗️Building is the most important action, as it lets you place down stations and rails so you can fulfill the requirements of project or agenda cards, or claim demand tokens - all of which are essential for scoring. To do it though, you need to unlock stations and rails and have a bunch of resources ready to spend, so you really have to prepare for build actions. This really surprised us, as we thought we would fill up the map with stations.
💬Which leads me to our main point of this post: Terminus is an incredibly tight economic euro. The systems are really great and clever, but you are struggling from beginning to end - similar to how we felt e.g. in Marco Polo. So if you are eyeing Terminus, be prepared for a challenge.
