Black Pawn Trucking

Description

Solitaire pick-up-and-delivery trucking game.

Rules

• https://ludism.org/piecepack/org/rules/BlackPawnTrucking.pdf (local copy)
• https://web.archive.org/web/2016/http://www.piecepack.org/rules/BlackPawnTrucking.pdf (original copy)
• BlackPawnTruckingTextVersion

Reviews & Comments

As I said on the piecepack mailing list, I'm going to try writing about a different game each week. Today I had to play a solo game and chose this one. I've been wanting to try this game for a long time, but never got around to actually printing the rules and starting a game. So today I finally did.

The set up is quite fast and simple, as are the rules. After about 5 minutes I was ready to play. The game has a clever mechanic for deciding what city has produced goods and where you have to deliver it: Roll the dice. For each die, place a coin suit side up on the tile with the matching suit and number. The only "problem" I noticed with this was that very often goods were produced on cities that wanted that good (cities with the same tile). Actually this happened quite a lot in the game I played, and actually made things a bit easier...

Movement involves spending money for distance traveled and goods carried, but then you recover it (and hopefully gain more) when selling the goods. As the number on the tile is the amount of money you gain (with null = 6) it's best to aim for higher destination cities, but sometimes it's better to go for a lower but closer one because of the travel expenses.

So the game is an exercise in optimization, given a random starting situation. I must say though that it's difficult to make money unless you're lucky. At one point I managed to bring two goods to a null city earning 12 in one turn with minimal cost. Then one of those goods turned to be a blank coin (goods are turned around into finished products that you have to deliver to a city of the same number). That was 6 more pounds :)

In the end I managed to finish the game with 5 pounds (after paying the initial loan of 10 pounds) technically winning the game.

I'll try to play the game some more and maybe add more comments, but so far I like the game. Tracking the money spent and gained is not exactly fun if you first discount what you spent on each trip and then add what you gain. But as long as you have enough money to spend, it's better to just calculate the net profit for each trip and update the money track once per turn. The game feels a bit puzzle like, but as the board is different each time and the goods are randomly placed, it's a puzzle with lots of replayability, which is nice.

-JorgeArroyo

Hi, Jorge, thanks for the comments. The dice are used to determine which cities produce goods, but not delivery. It may not be 100% clear from the rules, but goods must be delivered to a city matching the suit (raw goods) or number (finished goods). This city must be different to the city the goods originate from. Phillip Lerche

I see... I thought that any city that wanted the goods was a possible destination, even the one where the goods had originated. It makes sense too, as sometimes goods need carrying from one part of town to another... That's why I didn't even consider I was making a mistake :) I'll have to try it with the correct rules, but the game is hard enough already, this might make it too hard... -JorgeArroyo

You can always start with 5 or 10 pounds and no loans to make for an easier game. Phillip Lerche

CategoryGame SolitaireThemedGamesCategory ThemeBusinessCategory MechanicPickUpAndDeliverCategory