Curious Cargo Review – A Brilliant Puzzle with a Terrible Glassdoor Rating

Despite playing Curious Cargo several times, I still have no idea what we’re making. Yet it provokes an all too familiar feeling. The one where a directive from upper management tumbles down the bureaucratic pyramid until it lands on your lap. Filling your week with work that makes no sense.

That’s the background behind Curious Cargo. The two-player competition of shipping who-knows-what. Requiring you to build piped connections between your product-producing machines, and the trucks that will carry them off.

As such, each round is broken into two phases, with the first phase being construction. During this phase, you have three actions to spend on either drawing crazy-straw-looking pipe tiles and adding them to your hand; or placing pipe pieces you previously picked up onto your factory floor.

Now given you have no idea what you’re building, and are forced to use this bizarre piping system. I just had to check this company’s GlassDoor rating. There’s nothing there, just a large fire emoji.

So after you apply for another job, and both players have spent their actions. You move onto the trucking phase. Now, you only have two action points to spend on playing truck cards. The size and cargo space of the truck determine its cost.

When you play a truck card, you place it in either your factory or your opponent’s. Then move it along the side of the board, pushing all other trucks forward, until it’s fully beside your factory. Once the truck comes to a complete stop, load it with goods from your player board. Only the spaces that have a contiguous connection of pipes between your machines and the truck gain these goods.

Then on the other side of the board, if an opponent’s truck mosies up next to your factory, and you have pipes connecting a good on that truck to a machine. It’s all yours!

Also during this phase, instead of trucking, you can convert extra pipe tiles into truck cards, or discard your truck cards for additional tiles.

Beyond all these rules, you will receive construction tokens, truck tokens, and additional resources as rewards throughout the game. These tokens give you additional actions to spend during the associated phase.

You continue to produce and steal goods until one player ships nine goods, steals four, or one of the other three end-game conditions are met. At that point, any players with stars win the game. But if no one has stars, or you’re tied, then whoever has the most points from shipping and stealing goods wins.

Someone needs to read ‘The Goal’

The main reason you want to play Curious Cargo is because of the pipe puzzle. Stripped out of Ryan Courtney’s other board game Pipeline, putting together this labyrinth of poorly designed pipes is a delight.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn’t gel so nicely with the pipe-laying perfection at the centre of Curious Cargo. There are a lot of small rules that feel like bandaids for issues found late in development. That given more time and thought, would have been solved more elegantly.

One example is the five different ways the game can end. That’s a lot of different ways to end a board game. But beyond that, the scoring is also kind of crazy. If either player creates 10 active connections or steals four goods, then they get a star and win. Otherwise, if no one gets a star, or players are tied on stars, then it goes to points.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why this whole currency was invented for two scenarios that rarely happen.

That’s just one example, but there are many other rules like this. It seems like instead of coming up with an elegant solution to problems within the game system, a new rule was added on top.

The tragedy of this is that each one of these out-of-place rules zaps some of the excitement from the game. It confuses and takes away from the superb spatial challenge Curios Cargo puts in front of you.

Although these aren’t the end of issues with Curious Cargo, there’s also the trucks.

Trucks that only move when a player plays a truck card. Yet getting these truck cards, and finding a suitable time to use them is trickier than going and getting a heavy vehicle licence.

As such, the infrequency of their movement removes a lot of life from the game. There’s a real-world expectation that these trucks should be constantly moving and picking up goods as they go. Since they don’t, Curious Cargo feels a lot less dynamic and by proxy less interesting.

A sometimes perfect game

Out of the six games I played of Curious Cargo, one was unbelievably incredible. I drew the tiles that I needed to put together my pipes, which then allowed me to remove my extra pipes to get more trucks. That in turn meant my trucking line flowed picking up my goods as they drove by.

This game showed me the potential of Curious Cargo, and how awesome the board game could have been. Yet between the patchwork rules and the inconsistent trucking, none of the other plays even came close to being this exciting.

It reminds me a lot of Cerebria: The Inside World where it’s a fantastic game that gets in its way an awful lot.

That all said, the reason you play Curious Cargo is for the pipes, and the pipes are good. Very good.

Few games have put me into a state of maddening thoughtfulness like Curious Cargo. You go into the game wanting to make perfect connections between your pipes and your trucks. Simple to begin with, but doesn’t stay that way.

By the fourth turn, you’re staring at a board filled with metallic spaghetti trying to find where your next piece goes. Curious Cargo, to its credit, tries to help you with this by giving you options. Allowing you to place your piece on the floor, or put it on top of pipes you’ve laid before.

Don’t be fooled by this helpfulness!

Otherwise, you’ll end up like me, hunched over, piece in hand, looking for the perfect place to put it. But not finding any. Slowly descending into a state of madness. I mean with so many options, there has to be one that works for this pipe. Right?

RIGHT?!

My sanity aside, you have to give it to Curious Cargo, the pipes are amazing. If that was all that was on offer I would be singing nothing but praises for the game. However, when you consider the rest of the board game, it’s whole a lot less appealing. Still a solid game, but not one I’m dying to get back to the table.