Description

In Terrenus, the players become gods playing a game with the mortal world. The game is player in four phases, each a simple mini-game with different rules, but each building where the other left off. Each phase is roughly ten turns per player. The four phases relate to various godly activities:

Creation - The gods build the game world, using a tile placement mechanism. Each god will place ten, and score points based on number of edges connected and terrain features completed.

Population - Each god has 40 tribes to competitively place on the board, usually 3-5 at a time. The finger of god touches an origin square, and life spreads from it. Terrain features limit how many tribes can fit in an area. Points are scored based on how terrain is filled. This phase feels a little like Go.

Construction - With the world populated, the gods migrate tribes together. When enough are in a square, they build a temple to whichever god has a majority in their stack, and leave the board. Rival tribes are captured and converted by this process. Points are scored by using tribes to build temples, and by converting rivals' tribes. This feels vaguely like the city building mechanic from Civilization (original).

War! - The world is now full of temples. The gods each have a monster and a hero to summon from their temples on their turn. Monsters seek to defile rival temples, making them more difficult to summon from. Heroes go to fight rival heroes and monsters, or just vandalize a rival temple. Points are scored for slaying, defiling and robbing. This phase can feel like the endgame of Chess.

Each phase has a method of earning bonus points. At the end of the last phase, the gods total their scores to determine a winner.