Timely Transports — the first ever hybrid between boardgames and computer games

A hybrid board+smartphone game for 1–8 players about transporting exotic goods across the jungle.

Ages: everyone | Complexity: Low | Playtime: 20 minutes

What do I do?

You must lead a transportation company in the jungle!

Fruit, bamboo, birds, bees, all sorts of things will randomly pop up. It's your job to get them to the right city and score some points.

However, every time you move a vehicle, you must start a timer. If you stop the timer at the right moment, you may finish the movement. But forget about the timer and click it too late ... and you'll get a severe penalty.

Even worse, other players work in the same jungle too. If your vehicle is still standing on a city when a new one arrives, it is bumped off the board. So keep all your vehicles going, all the time, and you might just win!

What do I need?

This game is an innovative hybrid between an analog and digital game. How so? The game is played on a physical board with pieces to move around, but the timers (and more) are controlled by your smartphone.

As such, each player needs to have a smartphone with them.

These are the necessary files to print. (Click the "Download" button above to, well, download them.)

Two pages of materials ( = the vehicles and resource chips).
The rules — including images, setup and examples — are only three pages.
Scroll down this page to generate random game boards! When you find one you like, print it.

This game uses a campaign to make it super easy to learn. It has six scenarios, increasing in difficulty, allowing you to get comfortable with the game before adding new rules and mechanics.

That's all! The game is completely free, polished, simple, playtested, so have fun!

Game

Input your desired settings. Then click the button below to start the game interface on your device.

It will take you to a new page saying "Click to start the game". Wait with clicking until all players are ready!

Because it opens a new page, it's possible your browser registers this as a pop-up. It's not, I would never show pop-ups, so you can simply allow it.

Number of Players? Scenario? Which player are you? If used, each player must input a unique rank. (Order does not matter.) By knowing which player you are, the game can space out events and sound effects more fairly and evenly. Add Timeouts? If some of your players find the game too stressful, include regular timeouts. This gives them some time to breathe and make new plans once in a while.

Remark: on old Apple devices, the sound may be slightly delayed or elements may be bigger/smaller. In rare cases, it decides to zoom in and therefore hide the score. If this happens, simply reload and try again. (It always takes a while for Apple to properly support new web technologies.)

Board

Input your desired settings. Then click the button below to generate a random board!

You can generate as many boards as you want, until you find something you like.

Different scenarios require different boards. For example, in scenario 1 there are fewer cities and vehicles, which means the map is much more zoomed in than on later scenarios.

On higher player counts, or later scenarios, it's highly recommended to keep the "split board" option on. This creates a huge board consisting of 4 papers, which allows everyone to easily see and reach all destinations.

Number of Players? Scenario? Ink Friendly? If you want to print the board black-and-white, or just use as little ink as possible, check this option. Bad City Bonus? If the computer thinks a capital is worse than the others, it will give it a few bonus points. The owner of this capital gets these for free at the start of the game. Split Board? If disabled, the board is only one piece of paper (instead of four papers that combine into a larger board). Highly recommended to keep this enabled. Add rules reminder?

Feedback

As always, I make these games because I want everyone to enjoy the fun of boardgames, as inexpensively as possible.

I also make these games to push the medium forward and innovate with completely new ideas and mechanics.

As far as I know, a game like this has never been done before, with such a strong connected digital element and randomly generated player boards.

If you've played the game, let me know what you think! Mail me at [email protected]

Feedback, requests, player stories, bugs you've found—anything is welcome

Credits

I used the fonts Rowdies for header text and Yanone Kaffeesatz for body text, both freely available on Google Fonts.

I used the Phaser 3 library for programming the board generation and game interface, also completely free and open source.

All other parts of the game (concept, code, graphics, rules, ...) were completely made by me, Pandaqi!

I've written two in-depth articles about the creation of this game (as I usually do):

[Devlog] Timely Transports: about problems I faced, solutions I found, why I chose to do certain things (or not do them), general interesting stuff about game design.
[Technical Devlog] Timely Transports: about the actual algorithms used for the game interface and generating the game board, both high overview and actual code samples
[Update] Timely Transports: about the huge update I did for the game, half a year after release. Why I did it, what changed, and more.