Omnibus

I recently played my first Splotter game, something that I have wanted to do for a very long time. I always assumed that Food Chain Magnate would be the one, but it turned out to be Bus. A charming game from 1999 that provides just the right amount of brain burn for me.

Look & Feel

One of my fellow gamers recently picked up the Capstone Games Edition of Bus and it is delightfully put together. The board is bright, clear, and easy to follow. There is very little to parse when first presented with the starting setup. A very straightforward scoring track, the map itself, and down the right hand side the action spaces which are activated from top to bottom, and from left to right within the spaces themselves. The only real anomaly in this clean and bright design is the clock! An invention that a “crazy professor” has decided to allow rival bus companies to have access to. It allows players to briefly halt time, but is powered by time stones (little squished marbles) and if they run out the space time continuum ruptures! An interesting premise in a game that has players devising routes for passengers to travel to work, the pub, and home in a repeating cycle.

The wooden pieces are nicely produced. Not too fancy, but have a good tactility to them and have a fun, bright colour palette. Routes are long sticks, actions are small cylinders and then the buses themselves are cute little bus meeples. The passengers are big, solid orange meeples that are enjoyable to ferry about the place. The first player token is a big, chonky orange bus, and I just loved it. You don’t interact with it much, but it is just a small piece of joy in the game.

The buildings are probably the only lacklustre component for me. They are decent sized wooden discs with their symbols screen printed on them (house, briefcase, cocktail/beer). But they are in 3 shades of grey and aren’t immediately obvious on the board. Perhaps the brightness of the player routes meant that more colour in the buildings made the board too messy (particularly at higher player counts), so grey was decided as the best approach? This does feel like a nitpick to be honest. It’s a lovely package overall and has a pleasing table presence.

Gameplay

We played the game with 3 players and it seemed to play well with that number. Building placement on the board is cleverly designed to encourage player interaction early on, and discourage skirting around the outside of the play area (more on building placement in a bit). The players are all rival bus companies trying to ferry (or bus) passengers from home to work, work to the pub, and from the pub back home again; in a never-ending cycle (well, until there is only one player with action markers left)!

Starting with the first player you place an action marker on one of the 7 actions: Line expansion, Buses, Passengers, Buildings, The Clock, Vrrooomm!, and Starting Player. Action markers can be placed on any of the available action spaces in any order. You must place a minimum of 2 per turn, but fiendishly you can place as many as you want from your finite pool of 20 action markers (once placed an action marker is resolved and discarded from the game). When all players have passed the actions are resolved from top to bottom in the order written above.

I’ll start with Buses as although it is a very straightforward action it has ongoing outward implications that effect every player. There is only one spot available for an action marker, so the first person to claim it adds an extra bus to their depot, and this only happens once per round. For the player this has the effect of allowing them to move more passengers during the Vrrooomm! phase. However, the largest amount of buses in any given depot dictate how many lines, passengers, and buildings can be placed within those respective actions. So having more buses in your depot does give you a boon to your Vrrooomm!, but it also boosts the other actions for the entire table.

Line expansion allows players to place down a route between two junctions (like edges in a network diagram). The lines/routes are nice, bright, wooden sticks and the board ends up looking quite busy, but pleasing by the end of the game. An interesting aspect of the line is that you can only expand from either end of it. You are not allowed to branch out from any of the joins/corners in your line. This offers the player a strategic puzzle where you are constantly planning the snaking path of your routes across the board. One thing that Bus does, that is a kind of in-game catchup mechanic, is resolve actions in the reverse order of which they were claimed. So if player one placed an action marker first, they player 2, and then player three, the action would be resolved with player 3 going first, then 2 then 1. The clever caveat here is that there is a -1 penalty for placing your marker second, -2 for placing it third, and so on. So even though you go first, you will have less actions to perform. It’s a very difficult thing to explain in writing, but is extremely straightforward once play is underway. There is a simplistic subtlety and beauty to this mechanic and it makes for excruciating decision making as the game progresses.

The Passengers action allows you to add passengers to the two train station spaces on the map (either or both if you have more than one to place). Similar to line expansion the first player to place an action marker must place the same number of passengers as the maximum number of buses. The second player places -1 and so forth. However, this action is resolved in the order the action markers were placed. The train stations are the only way that new passengers enter the map. Passengers offer the only way to score victory points in the game, so a connection to a train station is critical.

The Buildings action sees players adding building tokens to the map—houses, offices, or pubs. Buildings must be placed on all of the 1 spots, then 2, 3, and 4 respectively. The 1s are spread around the centre of the board, so player interaction from the beginning of the game is inevitable. The buildings come into play during the Vrrooomm! phase.

The Clock action allows the player to interfere with time. Left untouched the clock will move forward. In game terms this means it will move from Home to Work, Work to the Pub etc. But a player that places an action marker on the Clock action has the choice of taking a time stone (-1 point at the end of the game) and it will stop time momentarily meaning that passengers will leave the Pub only to return to the Pub (if Pub was the active phase on the clock). We played this incorrectly during my first play, so I look forward to playing Bus again with the correct rules.

The penultimate action is Vrrooomm!. Effectively allowing players to transport passengers to their desired location (home, work, or pub) depending on where the clock is at. You can only transport passengers that are on your line, and you can only transport as many passengers as you have buses. If you can deliver a passenger to an empty building (defined by the clock) then you score a point. Simple. You can take this action multiple times in a round in the hope of using your buses more than once. But if there is nobody to transport, or no viable building you lose the action marker anyway.

Lastly you can claim the Starting Player action to acquire (or retain) the chonky bus token and ensure that you go first in the next round.

That was a lot of rules explaining!

Conclusion

All in all I really enjoyed Bus. One thing to note, that despite its cute, colourful presentation it is a mean game. You will frequently find yourself taking actions just to undo the plans of a rival player. If your group aren’t fans of mean games I don’t think they will enjoy Bus, but for me it feels part of the fun of the game. The game is a brain burner as there are multiple networks on the board and you are trying to picture what they will look like in the future as you lock in your actions for the turn. It’s an easy one to completely flub and end up scoring zero, but with more plays this seems like something that would become easier.

Bus is definitely a game that I would play again and would be interested in experiencing with higher player counts for a bit of added mayhem!

15 May 2025