The Great Heartland Hauling Company

Originally Heartland Hauling Co was released through Kickstarter, but if you tell anyone that these days I don’t think they would believe you. However, it came out a decade ago, back before everyone started making everything bigger, deluxified and coupled with multiple extra boxes for an All-In pledge. So this was just small, sleek and simple, and exactly what was promised on the tin going in, with one or two small extras. Let’s see exactly what that was.

Distribution Centre

On the front of the box we’re promised ‘A Cards and Cubes Game’ and that’s exactly what you get. The box is small in size, contained within you’ll get two stacks of cards and a bag full of wooden cubes in several colours, as well as getting some nice wooden truck meeples that you’ll use to move around the map during the game. The cards feature enough art to look thematic and convey all their game uses easily without being cluttered, but they do leave some empty space here and there, although all the cards do their job well regardless. That’s all the components you need to play the game, along with the included rulebook too for teaching you. All together the box just fits everything nicely and is easily portable to take on the go.

Loading Up

Once you sort out the cards it makes the set up simple for The Great Heartland Hauling Co. All the location cards are used to form the map for the play area. This has a nice scaling element where the size of the board is limited by the amount of cards that can be played, which is set by the number of players who are taking part in the game. Each player gets their own 18 wheeler truck meeple and matching cards to display their money and storage. The rest of the cards will be used for gameplay, including some extra cards for extra game modes that were unlocked during the crowdfunding campaign, supplied in the box though an included ‘inspansion’.

Before the game begins it has one of the funniest and thematic choose the start players methods: the player with either the longest hair or the best moustache will be the first player, and in the case of a tie between the two, they must arm wrestle to decide!

The game is very simply just pick up and deliver. Each turn players move their trucks around the map, any location card they move to has a type of good that the area produces, and several types of goods that they want to purchase. Cards available in the market will show you two types of pictures. Fuel, which can be used to move your truck around the map, or one of the 4 types of goods, used to both buy and sell the good depicted on the card. Through the action of selling goods the truckers earn money, and once a player has hit the monetary threshold based on the amount of players in the game, all the truckers return to base and score up. Any unsold goods cost you money and then the richest player is declared the winner.

Supply And Demand

The Great Heartland Hauling Co sounds simple enough to play, but there are some other rules to know that affect the strategies you might employ. Each location offers a different value for the goods they buy, so it makes sense to sell your wares to the highest bidder. The catch is only one truck can be in each location at any one time, so if you want to sell Cows for their maximum value and someone else is already there, then you need to wait for them to clear out before you can get in to unload. Skilful manoeuvring of your truck can block off fellow truckers from their intended destinations, delaying them and making them wait around or having to take a lower offer elsewhere. There is also a limit to how many goods can be at any location, so you’ll tend to find the pricier ones can get full up quickly if nobody purchases the other goods available there, and again this can be used as a strategy to fill up an area where your opponents are itching to sell to.

The goods themselves come in two different varieties, common wheat and peas or slightly rarer cows and pigs. They’re still readily available on the map regardless of how rare they are, but this sets the amount of cards belonging to that type of good and in turn how often you’ll be able to buy or sell them. So knowing that, make sure to pick up a stock of the goods card that you want, or else just horde all the ones your opponents need to prevent them from unloading goods for cash. There is also the option on your turn to discard cards if you decide not to buy or sell any goods on the turn, so you could plan to take everything they need then just trash it where they care unable to reach (until the deck goes through an eventual reshuffle).

However, these tactics don’t have to be employed, some younger or more casual players may opt to just move around the board doing their thing and ignoring the other players too, and this can also work out to be a valid strategy for gameplay, just work around what options are available. The gameplay also uses a supply of face-up cards or the face-down deck where you can draw cards from, similar to how you might draw train cards in the popular gateway game Ticket To Ride. This does introduce an element of the luck of the draw on the cards you can pick up, and sometimes can lead to moments of the face-up supply cards being full of all the cards no-one wants while waiting for the clutter to clear..

Pit Stops

The base game already provides some good gameplay possibilities, but inside the box is even more extra possibilities. There are set up cards which allow you to change the shape of the map at set up, so instead of having a big square grid with most places in easy reach you might pick a more thinner stretched out map, making some supply routes take longer than just to one turn to earn you the cash.

Every map card also comes double sided, the regular game on the front side and the advanced variant on the back, which adds features like road closures and toll roads into the mix that can cause you to have to change up your strategies, as sometimes you may need to spend more to take a longer route in order to still try to make a profit.

The game also includes the already mentioned ‘inspansion’, adding truck stops to the map, a selection of these cards are added on the outskirts of the map at the start of the game. These locations don’t buy or sell goods, instead they will sell a one off power that you can use during the game, allowing bonuses such as the ability to move diagonally or land on the same space as your opponents, but the more useful the benefit the more you need to pay to acquire them.

The ‘inspansion’ was a bonus raised during the crowdfunding, but for those looking for the new norm of crowdfunding bling there is none of that here. The wooden truck meeples could have easily been larger sized to hold the cargo on them, rather than storing it on a player map in front of you. All the goods are identical coloured wooden cubes which could have just as easily been designed as unique shapes to more resemble their type. But don’t let that detract you from the game, the aesthetics are nice, and if you fancy blinging it up there’s nothing to stop you from doing that, apart from maybe having to also obtain a slightly bigger box to store everything.

Fancy playing the game with 5 players? The box only says up to 4 but a mini expansion was released to allow a 5th trucker to join you, The Badlands, with a wonderful purple vehicle. Originally a Kickstarter backer benefit, this has been presented online as a free download in recent years. As none of the cards are mixed in with the rest it doesn’t matter if the printing quality doesn’t match the other cards, just worry about sourcing a purple truck meeple!

Refuelling

The Great Heartland Hauling Co is a really good game where with some good timing and a splash of luck you can pull off carefully planned strategies, or just wing it on the fly and take advantage of anything you can grab available to you. Games can be played in under an hour, with the box giving an estimate time of 30 to 45 minutes, although you’ll find this depends on the experience of the players involved and teaching time. The short gameplay time is ideal for the size of this pick up and deliver experience, and with the amount of different game modes and variants available it allows you to replay several times in an evening just to get a taste of them all.

Now, while the game can play with as little as 2 players, you’ll fins it works better with 4, or even 5 if you can get everything needed for that. So for anyone who regularly plays games as a couple you’ll still enjoy the game, I would just recommend to see if you can add a couple of extra people later on to get the full experience.

Finally, the designer has talked about organising a reprint this year, which should include the 5 player expansion, and add some plastic trucks which can hold the cubes, so that’s one bling option available already. So if any of these seemed like a potential problem for picking up the game then you might not have to worry about it, and if they weren’t then you should pick it up and give it a go.

Breaker breaker. Over.