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Across a sunny patchwork of fields, forests, waterways and rocky ground, roads slowly begin to appear. Some head towards colourful markets, others pass olives, strawberries and oranges, and a few start out looking suspiciously like we had no idea what we were doing. Give them a few rounds, though, and some of those roads start to make more sense.
That’s the idea behind Terravista, one of Chilifox Games’ new releases for Spiel Essen 2026. It’s a route-building roll-and-write where your goal is to connect matching markets and bring fruit into your growing road network, pushing four little horses along their tracks as you do. Everyone receives the same terrain results but works on a different map, so those roads soon start overlapping, joining and heading in directions you probably hadn’t planned when you drew the first line.
👥 1-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Eilif Svensson & Åsmund Svensson
🎨 Artwork: Sylvain Leroy
🏢 Publisher: Chilifox Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Terravista is played over a series of short rounds, with everyone playing at the same time. At the start of each round, one player rolls the two dice. Each die shows a terrain type, and everyone draws one line between two adjacent spaces on their own map that match those terrains.
Everyone has a different map, although you’re all working with the same dice result. There are six double-sided player boards, giving twelve unique maps in total. You also don’t have to continue from a road you’ve already drawn. A new line can extend your existing network, or you can start somewhere completely different and try to connect everything later. Wild results give you a little more freedom because you can choose the terrain for that die.
Drawing roads is only part of what you’re trying to do. You score by making two types of connections. The first is joining the two markets of the same colour. The second is connecting a particular fruit, either an olive, strawberry or orange, to any market. Each pair of matching markets scores only once, and each individual fruit can also score only the first time it reaches a market.
Roads can be reused. A route that already connected one fruit can later become part of another connection, and your network can pass through other fruit and market symbols along the way. Whenever you make a new connection, you move the corresponding horse one space on the central board. There’s one horse for markets and one each for olives, strawberries and oranges.
Some spaces on those tracks give you a bonus line. When a horse lands on one, you immediately draw a free line between any two adjacent spaces on your map, without having to match the current dice. That line can complete another connection, which might move another horse onto another bonus space and give you another line.
The game ends at the end of a round when at least one player has all four horses across the finish line. If several players manage that in the same round, whoever has moved their horses the most spaces in total wins.
Artwork & Components
Terravista gives each player a map filled with fields, forests, rivers, rocky areas and small buildings. The different terrain types are easy to recognise, which is important when you’re constantly matching them to the dice. I like that the boards still look like little maps rather than purely functional grids, especially before we start covering them in black roads.
You draw directly onto the boards with dry-erase markers, so by the end of a game those neat little maps can look very different. Roads cross large parts of the countryside, connect in odd places and occasionally stop somewhere for reasons we’ve long forgotten.
The central score board gives the game much of its table presence. Instead of pushing generic cubes along four scoring tracks, each player has four small wooden horse pieces. They’re colourful, easy to distinguish and easy to see from across the table. The board itself is double-sided, with the second side used for the separate point mode.
Then there are the two large custom dice, with terrain illustrations instead of numbers. The different faces of those dice are also shown on the player maps, so you can see that certain terrain combinations are more likely to appear than others.
Our Experience
It didn’t take us long to get into our first game. Once we’d drawn a few roads and made our first connections, there wasn’t much reason to go back to the rulebook.
We started that first game by going for whatever looked useful right then. Strawberry close to a market? Let’s connect it. Two matching markets aren’t too far apart? That’s probably where the next road should go. After a while, some of those short routes had done their job and were now just sitting there. Meanwhile, one of us had built a rather odd-looking road through half the countryside and somehow kept finding new uses for it.
We started looking at our maps differently after that. A longer route towards an olive seemed perfectly reasonable if it passed another fruit on the way, and roads that looked unnecessarily indirect could become useful several rounds later. We also stopped feeling that every new line had to connect to something immediately. If the dice weren’t useful around our main network, we’d start a little fragment somewhere else and leave it there.
We never reached the point of calculating exact odds, but we did start looking at the dice faces printed on the map more often. In one of our early games I waited far too long for one particular terrain combination. After that, I was less keen on leaving an important route dependent on a single result. The perfect roll might arrive. It also might not.
The bonus spaces were where things could suddenly move quite quickly. Someone would complete a connection, move a horse onto a bonus and then notice that the free line could finish something else they’d left almost ready. Another horse might move onto another bonus, and everyone would be leaning over the map checking what had just happened.
We spent more time looking at the horses as our games went on. Early on, it was tempting to keep going after whichever connections looked easiest. Then you look at the board and realise three horses are doing nicely while the fourth is still hanging around near the back.
Our games have generally been close. There’s no way to interfere with somebody else’s map, so watching the horses is about as confrontational as Terravista gets. Still, when another player only needs a couple more advances, the road you were happily preparing for later suddenly becomes rather more urgent.
Our Thoughts
Player count doesn’t change Terravista all that much. Everyone draws at the same time, so whether there are two of you or several more, you’re still mostly working on your own map. With more players there are simply more horses moving around the central board and more people to keep an eye on.
The different maps are important. Everyone receives the same dice result without necessarily having the same useful options. Across our games, none of the maps stood out as obviously easier or harder than the others. The dice can still be annoying, though. Wilds help when a roll causes problems, and you can usually find somewhere else to draw, but every now and then you’re waiting for a particular combination that simply refuses to appear. If having a plan held up by dice bothers you, Terravista isn’t going to change your mind about that.
I also don’t think Terravista has endless depth. We became better at judging where roads were likely to be useful and less likely to waste lines on connections that went nowhere, but I don’t expect to discover a completely different way of playing after twenty sessions. The maps and dice change, but you’re still approaching the game in much the same way.
And then there’s Trails of Tucana. It’s difficult to discuss Terravista without mentioning it because the two are very close relatives. Terravista feels to us like a more streamlined take on that route-building idea rather than something completely new. The dice replace the card-driven terrain combinations of Trails of Tucana, while the reusable boards, different maps, bonus lines and especially those four horse tracks make it easy to see how everyone is doing.
I also think Terravista is easier to explain to people who don’t play many games. Rolling two dice and drawing a matching road is about as immediate as it sounds, and the horses make the race easy to see. If you already own and regularly play Trails of Tucana, I’d think more carefully about whether you need both. They aren’t identical, but there’s enough shared ground that I wouldn’t automatically want both on the shelf.
I like that Terravista doesn’t wait for you to finish everything. Quite often the race ends with unfinished roads and one or two connections that were almost there. I prefer that to getting several extra rounds just so everyone can squeeze the last bit out of their map. Usually there was still something I wanted to do when somebody crossed the finish line.
There are also point, tournament and solo variants, although the rules for these aren’t included in the box. You can find them as a separate download on BoardGameGeek. Point mode is played on the night side of the board, adds one final round after the normal end condition is triggered and then scores the final positions of the horses. Tournament mode links several games of point mode together and passes maps between players, while solo mode lets you tackle either the standard race in as few rounds as possible or play point mode over 36 rounds. We haven’t played any of these variants yet, so our opinion here is based entirely on the standard game.
Terravista is one I can see us bringing out when we’re playing with family or people who don’t play that many games, but just as easily when we want a short route-building game ourselves. Everyone is drawing within a few minutes, the different maps mean the shared dice don’t send us all down the same roads, and the horses give us enough reason to look up from our own little patch of countryside. Most of our games have ended with roads we still wanted to finish. More than once, we’ve finished a game and wiped our boards clean, ready for another round. I don’t really need Terravista to be more than that. If everyone’s happy to start drawing again, that says enough for me.
📝 We received a copy of Terravista from Chilifox Games.
Going to Spiel Essen 2026? We’re reviewing a selection of this year’s new releases. Find all our Spiel ’26 reviews here.
