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All the thrills and excitement of being a parcel delivery firm and going round that express route come to your table-top! Well not quite all because you can’t leave packages outside in the rain at the mercy of the elements or light-fingered passers-by and you can’t throw them over hedges or onto roofs. But you can speed them across a sparsely populated United States in your three fiully-automated Trucks and Plane to deliver a full slate of packages before the backed-up demand gets too high and your company gets abandonded by its erstwhile customers.
Express Route – Deliver the Future purports to be a vision of the future where you are controlling automated trucks and an aircraft via the placement of shiny electric battery packs to deliver packages across the US. It is set, however, in the late 50’s – May 9th 1959 to be precise - according to the “New Employee Handbook” aka rulebook. You might think, 64 years later, that this future would have been delivered by now! The artwork seems to have an almost Whovian contempt for Time with some specialists dressed in garb redolent of the 40’s whilst others are equipped with wireless headsets and VR style glasses. Why, by the way, if we are dealing with driverless trucks and planes is one of these Specialists called a Driver?
No Time Like The Present
Let’s disregard this superficial veneer and consider what we are presented with in the here and now: a decent enough logistical, problem solving, puzzle game. It’s a Solo game or it can be played co-operatively with up to 4 players. (For competitive play on a similar theme try USPS- The Great American Mail Race) Each player will have a control panel into which they can place battery powerpacks to control any of the 3 trucks and the plane. The batteries are used either for movement or for loading/unloading.
Packages arrive from a stack to the “Active Callers” holding area and are of two types Low Demand with a value of from 1-3 and High Demand 4-6. At first they show only their originating cities but when they are placed on the map they are flipped to show their destination. As they are placed their value is added to the Demand Track. An Event Card will next be drawn which is usually an annoyance blocking your route through various areas or later in the game can have serious effects and downgrade your operation.
You must then manoeuvre your vehicles to collect and deliver them and reduce the Demand by their value. The aim is to get 8 delivered packages on the Delivered Package Track before the backlog of Demand overwhelms you. This will happen at level 36 on the Demand Track or level 40 if you have used an Upgrade to Unlock it.
An Upgrade, what’s that? Well, that’s the game’s great decision making area. A delivered package can be “spent” to provide an Upgrade to your operation : increased movement, speedier handling, more package options or crucially more and/or improved Batteries. If you spend a package it is removed thus reducing your total away from the target of 8 but making it easier to deliver further packages.
Special-ist Delivery
When you set up, each panel will be assigned one of the 11 Specialists, who each have Special Abilities. You get an advantage at Setup and an ability to use during each turn. If you are playing Solo you can choose to play with anywhere from 1 to 4 control boards and specialists. Playing with multiple boards is advisible as it gives you more choices re the special abilities and you can set up runs of moves started with one specialism and finished by another.
These specialisms vary in usefulness and level of power and you can experiment with different ones or combos to suit your playing style. These effects can be global or just apply to your Control Panel. So if a truck or plane has its capacity increased that’s true for whoever is running it but if you increase the movement of a truck on your panel that only applies when the truck is being controlled from that panel. Whilst this leads to interesting in-game strategies e.g. moving the blue truck when it’s being controlled by the one person who’s increased its move to 3 it can seem a bit odd that a vehicle’s ability can vary depending on who is behind the control panel.
Deliver The Goods?
Will Express Route deliver the future for you? If you like puzzle-solving, particularly logistical problems on your own or with a group of like-minded, parcel posting, people then it probably will. The game design is basically sound, with some frustrations. The map board and player boards are well made and the batteries are nice and slot in and out satisfyingly. The range of Specialist abilities are a strong point although some are more powerful than others.
Abilities that give extra actions each turn are very useful early on when you can’t seem to get to do much. This is a problem throughout and by the time you’ve upgraded to the point where you can do smart, interesting moves the game is nearly over. Do you spend all your early delivered packages on those vital upgrades or just limp along trying to deliver your freight of eight straight off? That decision making balance between keeping all your delivered parcels or “spending” them on upgrades is the key axis upon which the success or failure of your game revolves.
Express Route – Deliver the Future is about as exciting as running a delivery company gets but that said it probably won’t deliver enough to keep other offerings of my games table.
Editors note: This post was originally published on 4th Jan 2023. Updated on 6th March 2024 to improve the information available.
