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The Wasteland Express Delivery service is the link between the last cities on earth. You take on jobs from the factions that now control what is left of civilization – delivering goods around the towns to scratch out a living. Outfit your truck and get prepared – it’s a free for all out there, with raiders around every corner.
Wasteland Express Delivery Service is a pick up and deliver style game set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. With miniature vehicles, fantastic artwork and great flavour text, Wasteland Express really gets you into this theme as you drive through the wasteland, collect water food and bullets and deliver them to different locations, sometimes encountering raider trucks and enclaves who may attack or might provide you with the perfect opportunity to pillage.
Wasteland Express Delivery Service - Gameplay
Each round every player has five actions, these actions can be used for a variety of things, but the most common is movement. The first time you move you travel a number of spaces, if you end up somewhere you can perform another action you can move your action gear from move to that action and do it instantly. However if you don’t perform another action then the next time you move you will accelerate, moving an extra space, up to a maximum at three consecutive move actions.
All the other actions in the game are context sensitive; you can purchase items in outposts that have items for sale, you can deliver items to outposts that require them for money and quests, you can use special outpost actions such as the mod shop or drawing new quests or you can fight and pillage from raiders. After performing an action you place one of your action gears on that space which in turn tracks your speed/blocks off that action for the rest of the round.
Ultimately your objective is to be the first complete three first-class priority contracts; three of these are publicly available. Of these one is a constant in every game, while the other two are randomly selected from a decent sized pool. The rest can be found in the private contracts that you can get from the three factions. You start the game with one of these.
Some private contracts are priority contracts, which win you the game, while other contracts give rewards on completion. Rewards can be parts, allies or simply money. Money can be spent to buy more goods to sell, or to upgrade your ride. You can add more cargo compartments, a trailer to give you more room, armour, guns, missiles, turbos, nuclear vaults etc.
In the market each good has a base cost of a few dollars, then for each town that wants to buy a good that number goes up one. Every time someone completes a delivery the demand token they had gets replaced with a new one at random, causing the good they just bought to go down in value, then new goods to go up. You can’t sell at the same city twice in a row, apparently they remember what that “food” tasted like for a while. This prevents you from just hovering around one area of the map that is particularly lucrative.
Amy’s Final Thoughts
Where Wasteland Express Delivery Service really stands out for me is in its level of player choice. At its heart it’s a simple pick up and deliver game, but there are many routes to victory. The customisation really shines as you have some players who make fast cars to dart around the map completing odd jobs, while others get a big heavy cargo vehicle that can carry tons of goods at once for huge profits.
Others might still load up on weapons so they never have to buy goods legitimately, or you could try to balance them all. Of course you have to be careful not to spend too much time and money making a super truck while other people are completing objectives with the basic ride they started with!
Wasteland Express Delivery Service is a fantastically beautiful game, it has unique miniatures for each player’s ride which really injects character, while the minis for the raider trucks actually physically fit two cargo units on the back. Everything has been well thought out, with the exception of having double-sided tiles with the same design on them, I do feel they could have added some extra replay-ability with that, giving you a far more varied map from game to game.
The map is very varied however, with each game having you randomise the position of 16 terrain tiles and 21 location tiles. Naturally this can make setup a little long, especially for your first game, however the game comes with some brilliant inserts to speed that up. You simply take the insert from the box, remove the cover and then play directly from them!
I have to credit Pandasaurus Games on making a game about the aftermath of nuclear war without being too gloomy and serious. Wasteland Express Delivery Service is the best combination of theme and gameplay I’ve seen in a long while and is already one of my favourite games.
Fiona’s Final Thoughts
Wasteland Express Delivery Service initially attracted me with its amazing production quality – the box insert alone earned it a position amongst my most anticipated Gen Con 2017 releases. However, I was still pleasantly surprised that it sky-rocketed to become one of my favourite games of all time!
I’ve come to realise that I really enjoy pick-up and deliver games and I enjoy pursuing a series of short term or long term goals. Wasteland Express ticks both of these boxes. The contracts give me short term goals to work towards and it’s satisfying to complete these whilst identifying synergies with the priority contracts that are the steps towards winning the game. Your pick up and deliver strategy needs to be well thought out, so that you build up your vehicle sufficiently but don’t waste too many resources in pimping out your vehicle over zealously.
The market is also a really innovative concept that reflects the opportunities available on the board to gain the different resources. You need to plan your route across the board effectively to ensure that you take advantage of good market opportunities whilst you’re in the correct zone of the board.
The game initially has a slightly steep learning curve as you figure out how your personal player board works in allowing you to assign your five actions per turn, but we’ve found that the game starts to flow really quickly with two experienced players and can last as little as 45 minutes.
Wasteland Express combines lots of mechanisms really smoothly as well as incorporating a lot of player personalisation and board variability – for me it’s a fantastic board game design!
