Terminus

2-5 Players Best: 4

Very good development game with a clever rondel and closed market for resources.

Some good ideas. The route-building is solid. The art is good in places and okay in others. (Overall fine.) The symbology is fine. The rulebook is fine. The underlying premise is solid - use the rondel to select actions in order to influence the board state while working toward goals and scoring.

But the rondel is HORRIBLE! AWFUL! SO BAD! The actions are not arranged in a coherent manner. Gains for blueprints are in the same place as an expenditure for them. Same with cones. You enter the rondel with two expenditures in front of you. You NEED the start of round bonuses to FIX THE BAD RONDEL! It's tough for me to express how ugly it is and how much it will cause you to curse the designers and question your decision to engage in this activity. AAARRRGGHHH!!!!

Also, other parts of the game are just too tight. A player's resource inventory being limited to 8 is too little. It should be at least 10, maybe 12. Or let me expand it? The goal cards are too luck-driven. They don't fit together well so it's extremely hard to score 3 of them. If you find 2 that work well, getting a 3rd is just random fishing and hoping. There is no reason the market is as shown. Increasing the costs just hurts those later in turn order. It also becomes utterly random as the game goes on and players spend resources at different times from one another. WHY?!?!?? The development powers are not nearly balanced enough. They can be VERY STRONG or just useless. And if they are so strong, you'd be a fool not to pick one up from the start. If that's true, then the players should just start with one (maybe from a special pool of starter developments).

Yeah, I want to like this game - I really do! - but there's too much unnecessary pain. The rondel and the unnecessary tightness makes the whole exercise so ugly that I don't want to play. I regret backing this KS.

Have only played at 4 and everybody really enjoyed it. Felt like I was juggling trying to keep track of the resources I needed. I guess I like juggling because I enjoyed the experience. Also like when it all works out and I can slow roll the action loop and transact at each location. Looking fwd to trying the game at 2 players with my son. Hopefully it holds up.

Marzo 2024