The Fast Food Industry Is Tough & Will Destroy Friendships….
Truck off is a fun simple social game to play with your friends and see who is the best at working in the fast food industry. In this 2 - 6 player game you will play through 5 rounds in the aim to make the most money within the food industry.
What Is In The Box?
For this game inside you will find everything you need for a game you can come back to with a mix of tokens representing your food truck, money and any special effects. There are also cards that allow you to play through the game and affect how people get paid and how much they get paid, along with cards that will allow a fun twist to the game when you have become more familiar.
How To Play?
In truck off the game is split into 2 phases which players will go through, the venue phase and the card phase.
The Venue Phase
During this phase all of the venues that are in play, which are affected by player count, will become viable options for players to send their food trucks. Using the food truck tokens provided each player secretly chooses 2 venues to send their trucks to, this is done by finding their truck with the number on the back and placing it down so this number is not visible. When all players have chosen their trucks they reveal them and move each truck to the relevant venue, at which point each venue's payout is determined by the roll of the dice. I like this part of the game as it means that there are reasons to go to every venue as even the one with the lowest number could have the highest payout based on the roll of the dice. It means that players don’t all go for the same spot and are likely to spread out across the venues, creating diversity in this game.
The Card Phase
This is where the game gets completely unpredictable and can encourage players to mess with their friends, the way the rules play with this section also means that every time you play you can try a different approach and see what works well. Like the venue phase, the card phase happens in all of the 5 rounds of the game and within this phase players may use as many of their 10 cards to control the game itself with one catch, once a card is used it is removed from the game. This allows players to choose how they play, maybe one round they decide to use no cards while other rounds they may spend half their cards and completely destroy their competition. This idea of allowing players to choose how they play, and what they play allows this to break the usual mould in games where there is a set number of cards that can be used in a round. It allows you to all have different approaches and find ways to actually control the game even if you are first player instead of feeling like you wont be able to control the action.
At the end of the round all players will get money depending on their relevant position and then move on to the next round and play again.
What Else Is In Store?
There is a 2 player verison of this game but from my personal opinion it removes a lot of what makes this game great, it is clearly styled in this way to stop players from being mean to each other in a 2 player game as there will be a direct path for each of them with their certain cards. As for all games you can only bring 10 cards but have a total of 12 to use. I found it easier to bring all the cards that do not directly affect my opponent and it creates a fun experience in a 2 player game.
In the game there is also a deck of cards called daily specials which allow players to add a small aspect of variety into their game by adding new rules to the game for each round making it unpredictable.
Overall
Truck off is a simple and yet fun game about running a food truck industry and it feels like it. Is it the best game to play with your friends, maybe not, as to play it well you will want 2 other friends who are ok with the means aspects played on one another. Yet it is still so fun to play and worth the chance as it has a lot of fun challenging aspects to it that mean each play through can change, every time you return to it.