Haulin'

Traveling through an often-changing world of natural disasters and dreaded road construction, as a semi driver, your job is to choose which loads you want to pick up and deliver to cities in need. Choose to deliver dedicated hauls which only you have been hired to haul or race against fellow truckers to be the first to deliver nationwide dispatch loads. Then plan the most efficient route to pick up loads from a supply city and haul those loads to the corresponding delivery city.

Become a trucker, take the driver’s seat of a semi-truck, and test your skills against other truckers as you cross the country in an effort to rise to the top of the trucking industry.

The United States has very diverse geography and culture. All of the city cards have been curated by submissions from City Mayor Offices and Creative Commons. If you would like to learn more about a city / region, we encourage you to visit the Mayor's Office or Creative Commons websites referenced in our rule book to learn more about the cities and peoples of the US!

Haulin’ is a 30-60 minute long pick up and delivery game that both kids and adults find fun and engaging. Haulin’ is different from other pick up and delivery games in that it puts the emphasis on driving a semi cross country in order to deliver loads to other cities rather than paying money to draw a route to connect cities. In Haulin’ there is no need to draw your road, the roads are already there for you to drive on. No need to worry about counting money, money doesn’t exist in this game.

However, don't dismiss the game as simple. In just a few moves, experienced board game players will discover the layers upon layers of complexity Haulin’ provides which leads to hours of fun for all family members every time you open the box.

Vehicle break downs, natural disasters that close cities, truck stops, and dreaded road construction are all events that can help or hinder you and other truckers as you drive cross country. Every event card changes the game, making each game unique from the last.

Distance: Anyone who travels a lot will tell you it takes approximately 3 hours to travel 200 miles in the United States. This time can be affected by speed limits, rest stops, mountains, and traffic of course, but the 3 hours/200 miles is a good rule of thumb. In designing the game, we based the distances between cities using this rule of thumb as a guide.

Roads: "I-80! How could you have forgotten Interstate 80?" We heard this question loud and clear in one of our earliest beta tests with a family who has traveled more than we have. This one seemingly innocent question caused us to re-evaluate the cities and routes we had chosen. While we were making a game that was fun, we realized the game should also have true to life accuracy that a real trucker could identify with. Why did I-80 have to be included in the game? I-80 is the Interstate Highway that most closely matches the historic Lincoln Highway, the first road across the United States. It’s also one of the most heavily traveled interstates by truckers. Given that, how could we not include it in our game?!?

Event cards: No matter how well you plan, random unplanned events happen every time you go on a road trip. They are part of the fun and the frustration you learn to expect as you travel. During 40+ years of traveling, our family has experienced our fair share of vehicle breakdowns, blizzards, detours, traffic backups, and other random events. As we began designing Haulin’, we wanted to incorporate a randomness into the game that simulated these real life experiences. We hope you find these events as influential to your game play as they were to us on our real life road trips.

Our family has always been drawn to the classic pick up and deliver genre of games. However, as our daughter reached elementary school age and started playing more complex games, a few things became apparent. There was no way our daughter would play a 4 hour game that involved drawing lines with a crayon on a map. Similarly, games involving bidding on loads to haul and racing to acquire a net worth of millions of dollars was also not interesting to her.

We hope you find Haulin' as fun to play together as we do!