Food Truck Entrepreneur Review
28.12.2023 - 14:53
/ boardgamequest.com
We review Food Truck Entrepreneur, an economic board game published by GoVenture.
I was living in Los Angeles when Roy Choi and Twitter started the Food Truck Craze with the amazing Kogi Food Track, (Bring a friend and split the Spicy Pork and Short Rib burritos.) so I was excited to take a bite out of Food Truck Entrepreneur.
However, much like the wait at many of the food trucks that followed Kogi, this game takes way too long and leaves players with a sour taste in their mouths.
In Food Truck Entrepreneur, players each open a food truck (Ice Cream, Hot Dog, French Fry, or Taco) and sell food to customers throughout the city to earn money and XP. The winner is the first player to earn 10 XP and payoff your loan.
Players earn one XP by:
On each turn players may:
The spaces at which you may stop:
GoVenture claims that they are one of the original and most widely used series of educational games and simulations in the world. This game teaches you how to manage supply, hire/fire employees, make appropriate donations, and pay off loans. All important lessons for the 8+ age for which it is recommended. Just teasing, these are fine lessons, especially the concept of interest and importance of donating to food banks.
The problem with the game is it takes too long to earn XP. We even played the sped up version where the above actions give 2 XP instead of one and my 13 and 9 year old boys were “so over” the game when the score was 6/4/4/2. There is only one real strategy in the game and that is to sell $18 worth of food so that you only have to stop at the Bank one time and pay off your Loan plus interest plus your initial employee cost and truck cost. You can mix in donating food to the food bank and buying action cards to your preference.
So the game comes down to who rolls the best and who obtains the best action cards. In other words, it suffers from the same problem as most roll and move games with no new innovations to improve on this age old issue. On the slightly positive side, there is an optional rule that my boys really did enjoy, when two food trucks pass each other on the board the two owners have to say “Beep-Beep” and if you can finish saying “Beep-Beep” before the other player starts saying “Beep-Beep” the loser pays a $1 fine to the Cater Event space.
There is also a great fine for parents playing this game. If a dice roll hits a food truck or Food it is a $1 fine paid to the Cater event space, this limits how many times you need to reset pieces on the board.
I am not really sure of the intended target audience is for Food Truck Entrepreneur. As an educational game, the game takes too long to be played in schools. As a roll and move game for younger players, it works a bit, but again