504 First Impressions
504 is a world of Travelling Pioneers with a bias toward Individualism.
Pick Up & Deliver with Racing and Privileges.
In a distant future, scientists were able to build small alternate Earths. Exactly 504 such Earths have thus far been built. The scientists programmed each of these Worlds with an individual set of laws and rules which the residents strictly follow and consider most important for their lives.
In each single game, you take three different modules from the nine available and assemble them in any order you like to create a new game.
What you’re going to do in world 123 of 504 is pick up goods from one city and deliver it to a city that needs them. You’re also going to build settlements as you go to create income which you can use to buy Privileges and Upgrades. Delivering multiple of the same type of resource, different sets of resources and certain privileges will give you end-game points, most points win.
The board is set up with each city having 4 tiles of the goods it produces. Each player also gets an empty cart and a movement tile showing the cart has 3 movement points.
Players choose their starting city, load a good into the cart that the city produces and you’re ready to go.
Buying Privileges
At the start of your turn, you can spend $20 to buy one of the 3 available Privileges. These give you give end-game scoring or abilities. You can then spend money to choose 1 of 2 available upgrades. One is to upgrade your cart so it can hold two goods. The second is to increase its speed from its starting speed of 3 up to a max of 7 via 4 and 5.
Movement
You then spend 1 movement point per tile (2 over mountains) to move your cart. When you get to a city you drop off the good in your cart. You cover it in that city to show it’s been delivered and that good can’t be delivered to that city again this game.
You then load up the goods from that city and continue moving if you have movement points.
Delivering
While moving you can drop off settlements on tiles for income at the end of your turn. You only have so many and only get income from them the turn you drop them off so be careful. Cities and Mountain spaces are worth $10 each, the rest are $5.
When you drop off a good in a city, you place a resident on the top of the corresponding City card.
Income
After you’re done delivering goods you move each resident down to the bottom of the card. Then you get $10 for each city you have delivered to… So if you delivered to your 6th and 7th different city in a turn you’ll get $130 ($60 + $70)
Players take turns doing this until 23 goods have been delivered. You work out points based on the goods delivered and privilege cards, most points win.
504 World 123 Summary
This is a very nice, simple race to pick up & deliver as many goods as possible by spending wisely and using your privileges well.
You will cross paths with your opponents so you need to drop off your settlements in the high-value spaces. This will deny their income as they come round to where you have been.
Each city can only receive one good per game of a type. So once a Fish has been delivered to City 3, no more Fish can be delivered there. So you need to forward plan this. You can try and get in there first to beat your competition to it, forcing them to change plans.
If this was a game on its own it would be good, it would hold up as a light pick up & deliver game. Good fun, looking forward to trying more worlds…
Update 20/06/2018: I sold it before playing again. As much as I like the game, constant learning isn’t fun. Also, I’d rather play a ‘proper’ game than one of the 504 variants of it. For example, The Oracle of Delphi would be my preference for setting up and teaching this game.
Jesta ThaRogue
