Game Overview and Solo Playthrough: Free Ride USA | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Two weeks after covering Free Ride USA, I’m back with another look at this 2024 2F-Spiele release, this time focusing on the solitaire rules.

As I note in the video below, which features a full playthrough of a solitaire game, I’m not big on solo games, but designer Friedemann Friese created a brilliant one in 2017’s Finished! — which I covered in 2020 when we were all looking for solo games — so I thought I’d give Free Ride USA a ride on my own.

Turns out that the solo game greatly suits my gaming preferences in that you don’t fake playing against an opponent, but instead have to wend your way through the randomness of card distribution.

While I enjoy perfect-information strategy games, they need to be minimalist designs, preferably without a setting, so that I can see everything clearly in an almost mathematical sense. Outside of those games — the DVONNs and Tintases and whatnot — I prefer designs with a decent dollop of randomness so that players must confront both the plans of their opponents and the capriciousness of fate.

I’m not sure why I have that dichotomy of tastes, but I do, and the solo version of Free Ride USA mirrors the appeal of Finished!, with you being confronted by random cards — in both cases, three at a time! — then making the best of what’s there, sometimes taking action immediately, sometimes deferring in order to let other cards move to the front of the line, as it were.

Each turn, you spend a coin — starting with forty — then take an action, either using five building points to lay track or five movement points to move your train between cities. Yes, the solo version of Free Ride USA is an efficiency exercise akin to the multiplayer game, but instead of racing others to claim track and routes, you’re now trying to ensure that you can clear thirty blocks of three cards before your money runs out.

Where should my engine start?

To start, choose one of twelve routes, then place your train in the starting city. To choose a route, select a top card (in a column of three cards) as the start point and the middle card as the end point OR the middle card as the start point and the bottom card as the end point. Discard the remaining top/bottom card, then deal three new cards.

Pay to lay track (with mountainous terrain costing 2 points) and move (with each city-to-city link costing 1 point). You have two freight cars, so you can pick up another load when you reach a start point. Clear an active route when you reach the end point. If you pick up a coast-to-coast route (indicated by the two different half coin symbols on the chosen cards, get two coins from the bank. Keep going until you clear all thirty routes, or run out of coins.

At the halfway point, I’ve visited only one duplicate city (yay!)…but I’ve completed only eleven routes (boo!)

If you clear thirty routes, you then calculate your score based on the number of different cities reached as a start/end point (5 points each) and the number of leftover coins (3 points each). Any score less than 225 points — that is, all 45 cities (or some combination of cities and coins to cover up missing cities) — qualifies you as an intern. If you run out of coins before completing thirty routes, you don’t even meet that qualification. (Rumor has it that failed drivers are used as track in future games.)

Another failure! My solo record is now 1-5

I’ve played Finished! more than 150 times (and had to remove the iOS version from my phone for a few years to stop me from playing), and with all that experience, I became better at assessing when to use the card actions to draw additional cards, push cards into the future, put aside two cards to draw two more, and so on.

After only a half-dozen solo games of Free Ride USA, I’m not yet sure how to improve my performance. Obviously you can hope for routes to magically flip over in the perfect arrangements so that you drop off and pick up continually with nary a dogleg or wasted track — but I’m sure that luck is not the only thing that determines whether you succeed. Friese is a smart designer, and after my experience with Finished! I trust that further experience will yield better results.

Will solo experience improve my performance in multiplayer games? I’m not sure, but I did play twice this past weekend at a local con, winning a five-player game (my first victory after four losses) and coming in second in a 4p game, so…maybe?

If you want to second guess my performance or see detailed examples of gameplay, watch this solo playthrough:

Youtube Video