Bus is a deceptive game – at first glance it looks quite simple, a sort of Ticket to Ride without any cards. You’re building a bus network in some unnamed generic town and there’s a bunch of player pieces in each of five colours – sticks, cylinders, buses and a scoring marker. However, as you glance at the box you take in the cartoonish artwork and then you notice the publisher. Splotter. Famed for such excellent games as Food Chain Magnate, Horseless Carriage, Indonesia, and The Great Zimbabwe. In fact, this is the game that started it all – this was Splotter’s first.
Oh, this is no simple, light family game, dear me, no. This is a tight tortuous puzzle wrapped in an enigma. This is as cutthroat as any game from the Splotter stable. There are no cards or dice to blame here, only your own terrible decisions.
Bus is a deceptive game – at first glance it looks quite simple, a sort of Ticket to Ride without any cards. You’re building a bus network in some unnamed generic town and there’s a bunch of player pieces in each of five colours – sticks, cylinders, buses and a scoring marker. However, as you glance at the box you take in the cartoonish artwork and then you notice the publisher. Splotter. Famed for such excellent games as Food Chain Magnate, Horseless Carriage, Indonesia, and The Great Zimbabwe. In fact, this is the game that started it all – this was Splotter’s first.
Oh, this is no simple, light family game, dear me, no. This is a tight tortuous puzzle wrapped in an enigma. This is as cutthroat as any game from the Splotter stable. There are no cards or dice to blame here, only your own terrible decisions.
Passengers are born, like Benjamin Button, at the train station and they are then whisked away into a life cycle of home-work-pub-home etc. by the players’ bus networks. What made me think of Benjamin Button? Well, there is a time element to this game, hinted at by the Dali-esque melting clock on the box cover. That cycle of home-work-pub-home can be paused by taking an action to stop the clock. This is the ultimate in take-that-erry as you mess with everyone’s carefully laid plans. No, the passengers are not going to the pub next, they’re staying at work to redo their shift. But, take care, because if you do this too many times, you break the sacred timeline (TVA style) and the game ends. Also, the time stone that you claim when pausing time counts as a negative point at the end. This is not a high scoring game anyway, so a single negative point can be really quite significant.
Gameplay
Each player starts with twenty action markers – wooden cylinders in their player colour. You don’t get any more, so you will only take a maximum of twenty actions in the game. Actions are taken worker-placement style by putting a cylinder on one of several available spots: Line Expansion, Buses, Passengers, Buildings, The Clock, Vrrooomm!, and Starting Player.
There is an action selection phase where everyone takes a turn to place a marker or pass. You have to place a minimum of two markers before you can pass – placing a third or even fourth marker may cost you dearly later in the game when you have run out of markers. However, one of the game end conditions is triggered at the end of a round where all players but one have no markers left. This should prevent a mega run-away ending. Maybe. After everyone has passed in the action selection phase, the actions are resolved in the order listed above.
The three actions: Buses, Clock, and Starting Player only have a single action space available, so it’s the early bird that gets to do the action.
Buses allows you to increase your number of buses, which enables you to carry more passengers – one per bus. This is the limiting factor on your pick-up-and-deliver mechanism, and it differs from, say, Age of Steam, where the limiting factor is the distance you can travel. In Bus, you can travel as far as you like along your network, but each bus can only deliver on passenger.
Clock give you the possibility of halting time by taking a time stone. Another game end condition is when all five time stones have been taken, the space-time continuum ruptures and the game is over. The game is over immediately. The clock determines the destination of the passengers in the game and it has three spaces – home, work, pub. In the absence of a time stop, the clock moves on one step, so the passengers would normally cycle through the three locations. The locations are explained in the Buildings action below.
The Starting Player action gets to go first in the next round. If no-one chooses the Starting Player action, the first player marker (a bus) passes to the left anyway.
The Buildings action allows you to put buildings out on the map in the spaces provided. These are the bus stops and some locations or intersections will have two buildings, while others may only have one. There are four groups of location, numbered one to four, with the ones close to the centre of the board and the fours out in the ‘burbs. These have to be filled up in order – you cannot place on a “two” location until all the “one”s are gone. When placing a building you choose which type of building it is – home, work or pub. Note that two of the same building at an intersection is better than two different, because for one of the possible journeys a passenger can just walk (which they absolutely will do!) across the intersection to the other type of building if that’s next in sequence. There is opportunity, therefore, to put a spanner in the works for the other players by placing two different buildings at an intersection on their route. This action also provides the third of the game-end conditions. Once all of the building locations have been used, the game ends at the end of that round.
Line expansion allows you to add to your route, but there are some conditions. First of all you have to add to one end or other of your existing route. Secondly, you must avoid other players’ routes unless this is not possible – therefore most of the time you will place a route marker along an empty street.
The Passengers action brings more bus passengers into the game and, as previously noted, they enter at one of the two railway stations. The supply of passengers is ultimately limited, so this action becomes a null action in the late game when all the passengers have been brought into play.
Finally, the Vrrooomm! action is the pick up and deliver bit of the game and this is where you score points. Each bus can deliver one passenger to an available destination on your network. Each passenger so delivered scores one point. Unlike Age of Steam, there is no possibility to use anyone else’s network – both the origin and the destination must be connected to your own network. Each building can only hold one passenger, so there’s a bit of musical chairs happening here.
The maximum number of buses determines the strength of the actions. So, the line expansion action, the passengers action, and the buildings action are governed by the bus number. Once at least one player has two (three, four, etc.) buses, the bus number increases to the new maximum across all players. When you expand your route you add a number of new lines equal to the bus number. When you construct new buildings you add as many as the bus number. When you add passengers, again it’s the bus number that says how many to add. If you are second or third to select these actions, then you add or construct one less than the previous player. Vrrooomm! and Passengers are resolved in the same order in which they were chosen, but Buildings and Line expansion are resolved in the opposite order.
Everyone starts with one bus and there is a setup phase where everyone in turn and then reverse turn (boustrophedon) gets to place two line markers and then in the same way they all place two buildings.
Artwork
The artwork is reminiscent of a Scooby Doo cartoon with a melting clock and a bus that seems to have leapt out of a time vortex or something. The board has a similar, friendly cartoon style to it. It’s all quite minimalist and I think it fits well with the game’s theme. I would give it a 3/5 for artwork.
Likes and dislikes
I really love the puzzle aspects of this game and the lack of any kind of chance element. It’s a very tight game with lots of interaction between players and fighting over one or two points. The time stop element is a great invention that I haven’t seen in this form elsewhere.
If I have a dislike it would be that the line markers – wooden sticks (think fences in Agricola) in player colours – are too long for some of the roads and it’s quite easy to knock them from their intended placement, especially when placing another line down.
Complexity
This is not a particularly complex game as far as the mechanics go. But then, you could say that of Diplomacy. The decision space is huge and agonising – not for the faint of heart or those with a tendency to analysis paralysis. I’m going to give this a 5/5 for complexity.
Replayability
This game doesn’t need an enormous deck of cards or a gazillion expansions to ensure replayability. The simplicity of its rules along with the many combinations of possible choices of actions mean that it will come round again and again as a perennial favourite. I’ll give it 5/5 for replayability
Player interaction
Like the proverbial knife fight in a phone booth, this is a cutthroat game with lots of interaction – take that and denial. I’ll say it’s a 5/5 for player interaction.
Component quality
Components are pretty basic, just wooden pieces of various shapes. Having said that, it doesn’t need anything more, other than shorter route markers as noted above. No screen-printed pieces, no miniatures – all of these would distract from an excellent game. I think the components are, for the most part, as good as they need to be, so I’ll say it’s a 4/5.
Conclusion
I love this game. I can’t wait to play it again. It is rightly regarded as a masterpiece among board games, and I would rate it 90%.
As previously mentioned, this is a worker placement game combined with route network building. The closest game – at least, that I know about – would be something like Age of Steam or perhaps, Ticket to Ride: Berlin. Perhaps also Brass Lancashire / Brass Birmingham or Nucleum come quite close, although there is much more going on there – Bus is quite spartan by comparison. If you like any of those games, take a look at Bus – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
