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2015's Mad Max: Fury Road lit up the big screen with its post-apocalyptic road trip set to thunderous percussion and a wailing guitar/flamethrower. Now we may just have a proper board game to go with the soundtrack.

The post-apocalyptic world is not a new setting for cardboard aficionados; the Mad Max-inspired game Thunder Road from Milton Bradley still stands tall as a light action game with nice components. Contemporary efforts, however, have often fallen short, lacking the necessary focus found in that first mass-market game. New title Wasteland Express Delivery Service attempts to tackle this problem by welding an over-the-top Armageddon setting to a lightweight pick-up-and-deliver frame.

In terms of theme, the designers totally nailed it here. Fantastic illustrations coupled with appealing graphic design make for some attractive components. As a physical product, the love doesn't stop at the artwork. Wasteland Express boasts four distinct plastic trays, each custom-designed to store every component. From the game’s fantastic truck miniatures to the 20 large tiles making up the game's play surface, everything is broken down and given a home. The overall impression is of a luxury product—indeed, it’s not far from the high standards set by the recent Mechs vs. Minions.

In Wasteland Express, you're working the badlands as a trucker ferrying goods across lands where others won't. You'll make money by, say, grabbing some water from Attica and cutting through the raider-occupied desert to drop it off in New New York. This “move goods from point A to point B” style of play is descended classically from train games, and it’s also been utilized in adventure-style titles like Xia, Merchants and Marauders, and the Firefly board game. Wasteland Express takes the tested pick up-and-deliver formula and focuses on incremental improvements.

Game details Designers:Jonathan Gilmour, Ben Pinchback, Matt Riddle

Publisher: Pandasaurus Games

Players: 2-5

Age: None suggested by publisher

Playing time: 90 minutes

Price: $79.99 / £70 (Preorder on Jonathan Gilmour, Ben Pinchback, Matt RiddlePandasaurus Games2-5None suggested by publisher90 minutes: $79.99 / £70 (Preorder on Amazon

Wasteland Express takes that vintage core and folds an interesting economy around it. There's an intriguing feedback loop where you’re performing tasks on either publicly available contracts or privately held ones. Most jobs earn money and allies that grant special abilities, but a smaller selection provide priority first-class seals that move you toward victory. At its heart, the game is a race to complete three of these end goals.

In addition to assigning tasks, the contracts themselves provide much of the peripheral context of the game. The post-apocalyptic world here houses a collection of factions bearing distinct personalities. The gun-toting New Republic, the hippy-ish Oracles of Ceres, and the technology reclaiming Archivists all offer work, and you draw jobs from each of their individual stacks.

In addition to those private jobs, each game begins with three priority first-class contracts that offer a more narratively distinct set of tasks. These contracts are face-up and available to all. Options include digging up buried treasure, hauling a nuclear bomb across skeleton country, and storing up floppy disks for the technocrats. The public jobs are the single most important element in shifting the dynamics from play to play.













All of this feeds into an engaging cyclical pattern of completing smaller jobs to earn money, upgrading your delivery rig to increase performance, and then forging back out to complete bigger jobs. The progression can feel similar to that of a role-playing game as you personalize your vehicle with individual components from the mod shop. Tinkering with different builds— better machine guns or more cargo space?—offers a bit of nostalgia for those of us who grew up playing Steve Jackson's Car Wars. A solid variety is on offer with a couple of different offensive upgrades, armor, economic boosters, and even a turbo unit that jacks up your speed. There's a definite kid-in-a-candy-store vibe to the customization process.

Besides the delightful upgrade process, the other significant achievement here is the action system. A common problem with these types of game designs is oppressive downtime; participants lose interest quickly when double-digit minutes break up your interactions with the game.

To avoid this, Wasteland Express slices everything down into micro-actions. On your turn, you'll do one simple task, such as move, fight an NPC raider, or deliver some bullets. The system avoids sacrificing flow and velocity by using a clever momentum process; movement actions performed in succession generate increasingly good results. So your first move of the turn might be three spaces, but if your next action is a move as well, you can go four spaces. You can also break that momentum to perform an immediate follow-up action after advancing. This uses the action point spent on the move itself, effectively allowing you to double your efficiency every single turn (but at the cost of that momentum). It's a clever way to grant agency and allow for impactful micro-turns while riding those thematic elements.