Truck, Boat, Plane... a pickup-deliver game?

Recently Corbin was home from school due to parent-teacher conferences, so we spent some time together, and I suggested the possibility of making a game together. To my surprise, he seemed excited to try that, so I prompted him with some questions to see what kind of game we should try to make. He came up with an idea to "roll dice to move around and get stuff" with a truck, a boat, and a plane. I made some suggestions, and we talked about it, and before you know it, we were scrounging up pieces for a prototype!

Game design with the kiddo

I suggested a board with islands connected by bridges, where the trucks would drive around on the islands, the boats would go in the water, and the planes would fly wherever. Corbin wanted to sell the stuff, so I suggested there be a warehouse, a dock, and an airport on each island, as well as a bunch of cubes (color coded with the islands). If you land your vehicle on a cube, you pick it up, and if you land your vehicle on the right type of building, then you deliver cubes of that color to it. In order to make use of the dice, I started off with the suggestion that on your tun, you roll 3 dice and assign one to each of your vehicles, moving that vehicle that number of spaces. But just as we were about to playtest the game for the first time, I had an epiphany -- why not roll 6 dice and then take turns drafting them one at a time! So, you draft a die and place it on, say, your plane. Move your plane that number of spaces, maybe you pick up a cube, maybe you land at an airport and drop some cubes off. Either way, the plane has a die on it now and can't move again this round.

In the end, we ended up with player boards showing our trucks, boats, and planes. Each can hold a certain number of cubes, and there are 4 colors of cubes scattered around the board:

(I think maybe the cargo holds should go down to 4/3/2)

The top row of course indicates which vehicle is which. The next row is the vehicles' carrying capacity. If full, you can't pick up more cubes. When landing at the appropriate building, you slide all cubes of that color down into the bottom row, where they count as having been delivered and are worth points.

The game ends when either the cubes on the board run out, or any single player delivers "enough" with each of their vehicles. Once any player has delivered 3 (4?) or more cubes with each vehicle, finish the round and count your points:

1 point for each delivered cube
2 points for each set of 1-of-each-cube delivered
1 point for each 2 cubes remaining in your vehicles 

Part way through the playtest I noted that there are times when you might really want to modify your die roll, so it would be neat to have a way to do that. We decided to say that you could discard a delivered cube from a column to +/-1 a die assigned to that vehicle. That's a pretty steep cost, but based on the bonus scoring for sets, there are times when it would be worth it to pay that price.

So, how did it go?

To my surprise, the game worked pretty well, was even kinda fun! Certainly at least feels like it's got some potential. We need a title for it -- we can't think of anything yet. Feel free to leave suggestions in he comments :)

The game reminds me of an old game from 2003 called Logistico. In Logistico, you have a truck, a boat, and a plane, and you need to coordinate their movements to deliver items across the board. I like pickup/deliver games (more than most apparently), and I like logistical puzzles in general, so I thought I'd really dig that game. I don't recall all the details, but I remember it being frustrating and kind of tedious to get things done, and in the end, I was pretty disappointed.

This game on the other hand is very simple, you count some spaces, pick up some cubes, drop them off where they go... and if you put a little planning into it, you can pick up matching cubes with a single vehicle and drop them off more efficiently. It bugs me a little bit that a 4 and a 2 can get you to the same space, but maybe that's fine - just means nearby cubes are more accessible than more distant ones.

Playtests, blocking, and upgrades

In addition to having played a few games of this with Corbin, I made a TTS mod of it and played it with 2 of my regular playtesters. One thing that came up which I hadn't really seen before was blocking. We had a rule that vehicles couldn't share a space, mostly because the physical prototype board is small, and the grid spaces are small, so the pieces wouldn't really fit. With only 2 players, the idea of blocking didn't come up much, but with 3 players it was more common incidentally, and an emergent bit of gameplay was that someone intentionally blocked another player from delivering by sitting on an airport or whatever, and it was kind of interesting! I had warned the players that this was not going to be an Earth-shattering game, but they both said they kinda liked it!  

One thing I was jonesing for after a couple of plays was something to sort of power up the vehicles, like tech upgrades ("your plane can move diagonally") or one-time (or permanent?) boosts ("discard this card to +/-1 to the die"). So I tried making a little set of cards for each vehicle... when you make a delivery with a vehicle, you draw a card for that vehicle, and it gives you some permanent or 1-time benefit for later:

Your plane can move diagonally
Your truck can move over a bridge for 1 movement
Your boat can -1 its die
Discard this card to transfer a cube to another vehicle (thematically weird, but whatever)
Discard this card to move another vehicle this turn instead of this one
Discard this card to +/-1 the die this turn (maybe this should be permanent)

So far I like the idea of the cards, but some of them probably need editing.

It was fun to make a game with Corbin, and I love that it's not that bad! If you'd like to try it, post a comment down below and I'll make some PnP files or something - you just need like 56 cubes (14 in each of 4 colors), an 8x8 grid, the player boards (and cards) I can provide, and 3 unique movers for each player (a truck, a boat, and a plane).