Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 30 minutes
The Components
Pack & Stack comes with some good quality and fun-looking components. This includes:
Trucks: Actually "truck cards", as they're printed on linen-textured cardboard. Each one shows a truck with a certain height and a certain amount of loading space free.
Point Markers: Also linen-textured cardboard, these tokens mark 1, 2, 5, 10, and 50 victory points. They're printed in a wide variety of colors, to always make it easy to distinguish the point value is which.
Cargo: Actually, wooden bits in five different sizes. The smallest, white, block is a cube. The next-sized gray block is the size of two cubes put together. There are size-3 orange pieces, size-4 turquoise pieces, and size-5 purple pieces. The colors make it every easy to differentiate between the pieces during gameplay.
Dice: Five wooden dice, in the same colors as the wooden cargo.
Overall, the bits are attractive and fun to look at and use. I've thus given Pack & Stack a high "4" out of "5" for Style: very good.
The Gameplay
The object of Pack & Stack is to grab trucks that are precisely the right size to place your cargo in.
Setup: Each player is given 75 points.
Order of Play: In a standard round, all the players jointly engage in the following phases:
- Receiving Loads
- Picking Trucks
- Loading Trucks
- Paying Points
About the Dice. Though the dice are six-sided, they have unique amounts of pips on them. For example, the white die, which matches size-1 cargo is numbered 1-1-2-3-4-5. The purple die which matches size-5 cargo is labelled blank-blank-1-1-2-2.
Picking Trucks: Each player randomly takes a truck and places it in front of him face-down. Then all the players simultaneously try to grab a truck that best matches their cargo. They can't take the one sitting in front of them, and when all other players have grabbed a truck, the final player must draw one blindly for the deck.
(There's a slight variant for 3-4 players, where each player has two trucks sitting in front of him, but each player still just takes one as normal; the extras will be discarded.)
About the Trucks. Each truck has limitations on what can be placed on it, determined by the height of the truck (1, 2, 3, or 4) and its "footprint" (which is some part of a 3x5 grid).
Loading Trucks: Now the players simultaneously (but with no time pressure) load up their trucks. Pieces have to stay on the footprint and can't exceed the size of the truck. There also can't be any overhangs.
When all players are done loading their trucks (and it shouldn't take too long, because it's relatively obvious how to best use space most of the time), the trucks are scored.
Paying Points: Each player loses double points for each size worth of cargo he didn't load (e.g., a size-1 white cube is worth -2 point and a long size-5 purple cargo is worth -10 points) and loses single points for all the capacity of the truck he didn't use (e.g., -1 for 1 space not used). Yes, you can indeed lose points in both manners, if you had some big, awkward pieces.
It's not all downhill: the person who lost the least points in a round earns 10.
Ending the Game: The game ends when one player loses the last of his points, at which time the player with the most remaining points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Pack & Stack is a fairly unique games whose prime mechanic revolves around the very quick assessment of three-dimensional volume. It sort of looks like some older spatial games like Rumis, Ubongo, and Pueblo, but that similarity is pretty superficial; as I've already noted the actually stacking of blocks isn't a very tough part of the game.
The Game Design
Pack & Stack is generally a very light game. Each round of play, you just have one real decision, which is what truck you should take. It's an interesting decision, primarily thanks to the real-time aspect, but that's it.
As I've said, there's rarely much problem with stacking things in your truck. You pretty quickly figure out if you selected the right truck or not, but beyond that there's no option for any tactical stacking brilliance.
So, is it a good game or not? It depends on what you're looking for. This certainly isn't a game for the strategic player. However, I think it might be a good fit for families, as there's both excitement in grabbing the trucks and fun factor in putting your cubes inside. On this latter basis I gave it a high "3" out of "5": slightly above average.
Conclusion
Pack & Stack is a simple game low on strategy but high on hands-on fun. If you're looking for something for families and friends, particularly with younger kids involved, Pack & Stack might well be a good choice for everyone.
