• Designers:  Earl Aspiras, Tom Volpe
• Artist:  Edu Valls
• Publisher:  Inside Up Games
• Developers:  Conor McGoey, Carter Morash, Chris Walters
• Players:  1-5
• Age:  14+
• Duration:  90-180 minutes
• Times Played:  2
  

One of the most enduring and popular game genres are train games, which I’m choosing to define as those where the players build tracks between locations.  They go back at least 50 years (Francis Tresham’s groundbreaking 1829, the first 18xx game, debuted in 1974) and there are probably titles that existed prior to that.  There have been many wonderful examples of games like this over the past half century, so how can you come up with something new in the genre?  Well, maybe by going underground!

That’s what the newly released game Terminus does, since it tasks the players with building the best subway system in an unnamed city.  The game is from Earl Aspiras and Tom Volpe, a pair of first-time designers, and published by Inside Up Games, which is best known for releasing Earth last year.  It’s a competitive, heavyweight action selection game with some innovative touches and I’ve loved my first two plays of it.  Here are my early impressions about this game, which just recently become available to the general public.

So yes, you’ll be building a subway, but be warned that the final product probably won’t be very cohesive.  Then again, based on my experience with the oft-delayed construction of the Metro when I lived near Washington DC, maybe that’s pretty realistic.  Here’s what the game board looks like.

The city itself is on the right hand side of that picture and if you squint hard, you’ll realize that it’s arranged in a 5×7 rectangle consisting of square blocks.  There are empty circles on the corner of each block called plots where the players can place their stations.  As the picture shows, the city is divided into 7 named districts, and each district is in one of three colors, representing residential, commercial, and industrial areas.  Some blocks straddle multiple districts.  There is a crazy quilt of potential rail lines across the map; most of them connect the plots orthogonally along the edges of the blocks, but quite a few run through blocks.  Double lines represent rail lines that can be built by two players.  The end effect is that they’ve given you multiple ways of constructing your subway lines.

The game is played in three rounds called years.  On a player’s turn, they will take an action via a kind of rondel called the Action Loop.  In the above picture, this is on the left-hand side.  Here’s a reoriented closeup of it, so you can see it better:

The Action Loop is a circular path with six Zones (the spaces for the Zones are the elongated white rectangles arranged along the outside of the circle).  Each Zone contains two or three possible actions.  (Some actions are shaded in two colors, which indicates that they can be carried out in two different Zones.)  The player must move their piece ahead at least one Zone, but they can skip as many Zones as they like.  The player chooses exactly one action in the Zone they move to and then it’s the next player’s turn.  Each year consists of three cycles of the Action Loop.  When a player circles the loop three times, they take no further actions that year, but the order in which they finish determines the player order for the next year.  After three years, the game ends and victory points are tallied up.

Income and Resources

At the start of every year, each player receives income.  This comes from three sources:

• A sum of money (in the unit of coins), based on how many stations the player has placed (more stations equals more money).

• A bonus:  there are five different bonuses the player can choose from, which give them different amounts of resources and such.  All of them are available to each player and they can only choose one of them, but they may select a different bonus each year if they wish.

• In years 2 and 3, players going earlier in the turn order get a small benefit, to make up for them presumably accomplishing less during the previous year (since they finished earlier).

The first two sources are shown on the player board each player receives, so let’s take a look at one.

The shaded row with the octagonal spaces that goes across the entire player board are where you store your stations.  Prior to the first year, only the first station starts on the board, so the board shows that each player will start with 12 coins.

The five possible bonuses are shown in the upper left part of the player board.  Those icons represent the game’s four resources, as well as track.  Here’s what each of those looks like:

The pieces are nicely made, so you could probably figure this out on your own, but beginning in the lower left and moving clockwise, the picture shows a Construction resource (the traffic cone), a piece of track, a Blueprint resource, a Power resource, a Permit resource (the folder), and a lobbyist (each player has 8 lobbyists; more about them later).

The coins you earn as income each year are particularly critical; since there are very few ways of earning more during your turns, it pretty much has to last you all year.  Spend wisely, subway planner!

At the start of the game, in addition to selecting their first bonus, the players, in reverse turn order, place their initial station on the map on an empty plot.  (This is actually a special kind of piece called a hub; I’ll discuss those more in a bit.)  Each players’ other 12 stations start the game in their octagonal slots on their player board.

Taking Actions

There are a total of 13 actions spread out over the 6 Zones.  Some of them are shared between Zones, so that there’s more than one spot where you can do them, but remember, you can never do more than one action in the Zone you move to.  Here’s a sample of the kind of things you can do in the game:

• Buy Resources – There are four different resources in the game:  Permits, Blueprints, Power, and Construction.  There is an action for buying each of them and each has its own supply.  These are arranged in columns, so buying a specific resource from its first column costs 1 coin, the ones in the second column cost 2 coins, and so on.  The resources form a closed economy, so when they’re used, they go back to their spot, filling the most expensive open locations first.
  
  When you purchase a resource, it goes into your storage area, which only has room for 8 items (it’s the area of the player board that shows 8 cube icons).  It can hold different kinds of items, but no more than a total of 8.  So managing your resources is a real challenge.
  
  
• Buy Track and Stations – You also need to buy the tracks you’ll be building, but they work differently from resources.  Track pieces come from your personal supply (in your color) and are stored in a separate area.  There’s no limit to how much track you can store.  Each players’ stations begin on their player board, but they aren’t available for them to use until they raise their capacity, which frees some of them up.  This costs resources, so for all intents and purposes, the players have to buy them.

• Build Track and Stations – This is kind of quirky.  To build, you have to spend a set number of resources.  You can then build as much track as you wish (as long as you’ve purchased it previously).  However, when you connect to a vacant plot, you have to place a station on it and each station you place costs you an additional specific resource.  Of course, the stations also have to be available, by you sufficiently raising your capacity earlier.  And you have to manage all this with your tiny little 8 resource storage limit.  So the potential is there for some dramatic track building, but it requires a good deal of planning.
  
  You also have the option of laying track to connect to an opponent’s station.  If you do that, you get a Power token and they get 1 coin.  This keeps you from being locked in and can also be useful if you don’t have a station available.  The important thing is that the only way you can build track is if you connect to a station; it must either be one you place this turn or one of your opponents’ existing ones.
  
  The first time you lay track, it must extend from your initial hub.  After that, all new track building must extend from the station you most recently connected to—this is called your terminus.  You’re also not allowed to intersect your own track and the terminus rule means your track can’t branch; consequently, your track is linear and it’s always obvious which station is your terminus (it could even be one of your opponents’ stations, if you connected to one).
  
  
• Gain New Abilities – There are actually several ways in which you can gain enhanced abilities, which is always fun.  Here’s a summary:

• • Developments – At the beginning of the game, 15 randomly chosen Developments are laid out for all the players to use.  One of the actions is to take an unused development, put one of your lobbyists on it, and place it in a block next to one of your stations.  Each Development gives you an ability associated with one of the Zones.  In essence, when you move to that Zone, you have an extra, enhanced action you can take, in addition to the ones normally available at that Zone.  One other player who has a station next to that Development can take an action to put one of their lobbyists on it, which allows them to also use its ability, but no more than two players can access a Development.
  • Advanced Upgrades – There are six standard advanced upgrades which are available each game.  For an action, you can buy one of them, but you can’t have more than two per game.  These let you do cool things like substitute one resource for another, take extra actions, or earn additional coins.  You can definitely try to mix and match these to fit your strategy.
  • Standard Upgrades – If you raise your capacity high enough, you can unlock one of two standard upgrades, both of which give you extra abilities when building.  Raise it still higher and you can unlock the second one as well.  One upgrade lets you build from either end of your subway line, not just the terminus, which can be handy.  The other lets you build hubs.  To build a hub, you just plop a station token on top of a station you’ve already built.  Of course, you have to pay for it and the new station token needs to be available.  Hubs give you more end game points.
    

• Get New Ways to Earn End Game Points – There are several ways to do this.  At the start of the game, 4 Project cards are randomly exposed.  These give you conditions for earning end game points.  For an action and some of your lobbyists, you can qualify to earn these; up to two players can claim each Project.  Projects are available for all the players, but Agendas are cards you draw (for an action and a resource) that also assign end game points, but which apply only to you.  Both Projects and Agendas can be enhanced by adding additional lobbyists to them; this lets you earn more VPs if you do particularly well with the conditions.  Finally, there are demands, which are associated with a specific district.  For an action and a resource, you can grab one if you have a station in that district.  The more demands you’ve acquired, the more end game points you score and the amount can be pretty significant if you get a bunch of them.

After 3 years, everyone tallies up their VPs.  You get points for your stations on the board, but only if they’re next to Developments (even those you didn’t claim).  Hubs are worth two or three times as much as stations if they’re next to either one, or to multiple, Developments.  You also score for the Projects and Agendas whose requirements you met and for the number of Demands you’ve acquired.  Add them all up and the player with the most VPs is the king of the subways!

My Impressions

Terminus is the first 2024 game to really grab me.  It’s undoubtedly a heavyweight, but it’s not really packed with rules and doesn’t take that long to teach, which bucks the recent trend for many of the heavier designs.  It has quite a few innovative touches and puts a real premium on planning, but you also need to stay flexible and take advantage of chances that might develop over the course of the game.  I think it makes for a very satisfying game experience.

One of the highlights of the game is the way they implemented the Action Loop.  Having multiple actions available for each spot on a rondel doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but it really adds to the amount of advanced planning you need to do in order to meet your goals.  It wouldn’t surprise me if an earlier game used something like this, but I can’t really think of one.  You only get 9 orbits of the Loop over the course of the game, so getting the most out of each of those circuits is really important.

Making this more difficult are the limitations the game imposes on you.  Money is really tight and it’s not unusual for players to find themselves midway through the year without sufficient cash to do what they want.  The fact that you can only store 8 resources at a time is another painful restriction you have to learn to deal with.  Finally, deciding how to employ your 8 lobbyists can lead to tough decisions.  Managing all these limitations means it’s even more important to properly plan things out.

But what I think really sets Terminus apart are the many additional abilities you can acquire.  The different Developments have quite varied effects and, in combination with the standard upgrades that you choose to add, they really influence the way you approach the game.  They make each game play quite differently, in a very satisfying way.

To be honest, the options you have with these can be a bit overwhelming, particularly for first-time players.  Every game, 15 different Developments are provided, most of them at least a little bit complex, and you really need to grab a couple of them.  You can use the Projects that are in play for that game as a guide, along with your beginning Agenda, but absorbing all of that can be pretty dizzying.  I suppose really good Terminus players are able to survey all of the initial conditions and focus on the best ones, but I’m nowhere near that level of expertise.  So I just pick out a few Developments that look interesting, and which might help me with the Projects and Agendas, and leave it at that.  So far, that’s made for a fun game that doesn’t splinter my brain, but the amount of skill you can apply to this seems to be really high.

Player interaction is a big part of the game, in the non-destructive manner that is typical of Euros.  Your opponents can’t keep you from using an action on the Action Loop, but they can sure make your life harder (or easier!) by buying the cheaper resource tokens or returning them to the supply via a build prior to you getting there.  Successfully anticipating what your fellow players are about to do is therefore a useful skill.  There’s also competition for the Developments, the Projects, the advanced upgrades, and the demands.  Finally, the way your opponents build their rail lines has a big effect on you, by making it harder for you to expand into areas you want to go, keeping you from placing stations that earn you income and VPs, or, conversely, giving you stations to connect to if you lack the resources or stations to expand normally.  The board play of track and station building is a lot of fun and there can be a good amount of jostling for position there, with the timing of your moves being pretty important.  So that’s another big plus in my book.

So far, I’ve played with 4 and with 5 players.  I think I prefer the 4-player game a little bit, because it’s snappier, but it played very well with 5 and actually having a meaty new game that handles that number is a real bonus these days.  With 3 players, there are fewer Developments, Projects, and upgrades made available, so it’s tailored to the player count in that sense, but the same board is used, so things might be a little less tight with that number.  That could be good or bad, depending on your group’s preferences.  The other side of the board is used for the solitaire and 2-player games; in games with both those numbers, an Automa player is employed, who operates using some additional cards.  The duration is listed at 45 minutes per player and that’s probably pretty accurate once players gain experience, but you should expect your first game to run longer.

I think the components are quite nice.  The artwork on the board is a lot to take in at first, but once you realize what’s going on, it’s pretty clear.  The resource tokens are cute and well made.  They’re a bit small, which can make them a challenge to pick up if you have fat fingers like me, but it’s really not a big deal.  The iconography, particularly on the Development tiles, isn’t great, but an Appendix is provided that explains them all (and you’ll be consulting it pretty frequently).  Not ideal, but not too unusual these days and, honestly, since the tiles have to be small enough to be placed on the board, I don’t see how they could have made this much better.  One pleasant surprise is that the game isn’t a table hog.  Sure, you’ll need a good deal of space for all the tiles and resources that need to be laid out, but the board is actually rationally sized, as opposed to the gigantic slabs of cardboard we so often see today.  The rules are clear enough, but, as I so often find, the organization isn’t the best—they go over a bunch of “Key Concepts” before you have any idea of what you’re doing and, as a result, you find yourself jumping around in the rules and having to read things multiple times.  Still, everything is there.  The teach is shorter than many other games of its weight, since most of the actions are pretty straightforward.  All in all, it was nice to play a heavier game that didn’t require a huge investment of time to learn.

Overall, I’m very pleased with Terminus.  It was not a game that was on my radar when it was announced and I frankly didn’t expect a title this refined from two first-time designers, but it really delivered.  It provides a nice meaty experience that fans of advanced planning should definitely enjoy.  I can’t say for sure after only two games, but given how much the different Developments and Projects affect the play of the game, I strongly suspect this will be quite replayable.  And if your group often includes 5 players, you should really check it out, as it seems to play very well with that number.  So if you’re looking for a different kind of train game and you like your gameplay to be deep, go deep—underground!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Simon Neale:  I have to take the opposite view to Larry about the rondel of actions. To me the design of the rondel has made the order in which you can do the actions as awkward as possible for the players – the resources you require to carry out an action appear later on the rondel than the action needing those resources. So in order to alleviate this you can get tiles that allow you to effectively change the rondel order. Whilst I appreciate some players may “enjoy” such a challenge, to me it feels like unnecessary work that could have been streamlined in the design. Adding in a couple of swingy upgrades you can obtain, and this game is not for me.

Alan H.:  As Larry has described there’s a lot going on. My approach to learning a game like this is to get the core concepts explained, the main issues to deal with and not go into too much detail about the different development tiles, for example. So for me the outline concepts in the rule book marry up with my approach. I’ve taught the game to several groups, but always for 3 or 4 player games. And after a short while most people are pretty much there. A second copy of the rule book would be helpful to speed up your first game, but unfortunately no one does this. Sadly.

The key aspect of the game is the limit of 8 storage spaces. For such a simple rule, its impact is very wide. The choices it forces as you navigate the rondel are sublime, as you ponder how to get rails or track built or developments down. 

The variety of targets to achieve, developments to build or join provide different experiences each time. So after 5 games (a rarity for me) I’m still excited to play many more times.

Ben B.:  As this is a pretty hefty game, I feel like I have only scratched the surface of its depth with my one play. I did not do well as I ignored the upgrades to my own detriment. I don’t own a copy but I enjoyed it enough that I’d play again. Nucleum is still my favorite heavier game of recent days but this has given meaty gamers more to work with. 

Simon W.:  One play of this so far but I’m definitely looking forward to more. Larry covered all the good aspects of the game from an intriguing and flexible rondel to the limitations on resource storage and the puzzly nature of the game. There is huge player variability in the development and project tiles too.  I found this a well-tuned, well made, well-developed game and I wouldn’t be surprised if it finished in my top two games of 2024.  Love it. 

Fraser:  I may be the only one on the planet, but when I heard the name I thought it was going to be a game set in the Foundation universe. I am sure it is a very good game, but there will always be that slight tinge of disappointment for me :-)

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it:  Larry, Alan H., Simon W.
• I like it:  Steph, Michael A.
• Neutral:  Jonathan, Craig, Ryan, Ben B.
• Not for me:  Simon Neale