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 other fun elements like events) are controlled by your smartphone.
As such, each player needs to have a smartphone with them.
These are the actual materials you need to print:
- This game has two pages of materials to print and cut ( = the vehicles and resource chips).
- The rules for your first game are really simple and fewer than 3 pages
- Scroll down this page to generate random game boards! When you find one you like, print it.
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.
Remark: on some devices, the sound may be slightly delayed or elements may be bigger/smaller. This should not impact gameplay, although I wish Apple would stop being so annoying and just support web stuff properly.
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! (As always with random generation, boards can sometimes be unfair or messy.)
Remark: On higher player counts, more cities appear. If you want, you can use that to make the game a bit easier: simply print a board meant for 5 players when you're actually playing with 3. Because there are way more cities and connections to use, the game is less cutthroat.
Feedback
As always, I make these games because I want everyone to enjoy the fun of boardgames, as inexpensive 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