Mage Food Truck: A deckbuilder that I love being terrible at

I’ve said before that I’m not very good at deckbuilders, mainly due to my inability to focus for long enough to read what each card actually does and my impatience, which regularly leads to me playing or picking cards that are mostly useless at the time when I play them. However, there are some deckbuilders that I love being bad at, and Mage Food Truck is one of them.

Developed by solo dev Adam Stewart, aka One Man Left, Mage Food Truck truly manages to feel like a board game that’s become virtual, with characters that are equal parts lovable and frustrating, a huge variety of cards, some curses, and even some cooking involved. It’s a joy to play, even for me, as a ‘deckbuilder noob’.

The luck of the draw

In Mage Food Truck, the main aim is to collect ingredients, use them to cook dishes, and then sell those dishes to the people who want them. That’s the easy part, and it really is remarkably easy in the first couple of ‘appetizer’ levels that introduce you to the basic mechanics of gameplay. The difficulty arrives in later levels, when the colorful cast of characters has been increased, and various new cards are thrown into the mix. 

After each round, you can use your earned ‘Bucks’ to purchase new cards that then go into the deck for potential drawing, or you can buy some Leftovers if you have no money. In fact, if you have no money, you have no choice but to buy the Leftovers, because you can’t end a round without adding a card to your deck. It’s a useless card, with no mana to provide, so you really want to avoid that where possible. 

With more cards comes less chance of pulling the ones you actually need, and this is particularly troublesome when you haven’t pulled an Adventurer card in three turns, which results in you not finding any ingredients, so then you can’t cook anything to sell. There’s a vicious curve that happens when you get unlucky with your card pulls, and it feels more brutal with each higher difficulty level that you choose to play. 

Characters are lovable, but sometimes elusive

There are, as I’ve discovered thus far, four main characters, each of whom has their own special skills and abilities:

• Adventurer: Used to move between the spaces on the board

• Chef: Played to cook ingredients found around the board

• Mage: Played to add shield points to the truck, protecting the main lives from attack

• Bard: Used to add EXP to characters, unlocking new ability cards that can be played

You can use any action with any card, technically, but you need to make sure you have enough mana on other cards to facilitate it. I found it easiest to use each card for their designated purpose, for the most part, unless I was really in a pinch.

Like I said, the more characters and other cards you have in your deck, the more elusive the characters seem to become. You can be waiting for multiple rounds to see a Chef card, only to realize that you don’t have any ingredients because you haven’t pulled an Adventurer card for a few rounds either. That is, to me, the biggest frustration of Mage Food Truck, but it’s also part and parcel when it comes to playing deckbuilders.

The Bard is, by far, the MVP. If you pull a Bard card, you can use it to unlock abilities that negate the frustration of elusive character cards. One of the ability cards you unlock for the Chef is to have her forage, which will provide you with ingredients even if you haven’t moved. The Bard can also put on shows to bring in a little extra cash, which is always nice.

Some spaces are better than others

As I said, Mage Food Truck feels like a virtual board game because of the main setup. You have a ‘board’ filled with spaces, and each space will welcome you with something that will either help or hinder your progress. You can find an ingredient or gain a card, or you could face up against bandits who want to steal your money, and it feels like sheer luck that decides what you encounter at each space. 

Thankfully, there are some helpful souls out there. Some spaces introduce you to generous strangers who reveal what’s in another space, either good or bad. This helps you plot your route to avoid encounters that you can’t afford to get caught up in, either because you have no mana to fight off the beasts or because you have no money to pay the bandits to leave you alone. 

The spaces you want are the golden ones, where you can sell your meals to hungry, unseen patrons. Meals with two ingredients go for $50, while meals with four ingredients sell for $200, although their ingredients are harder to track down. With that said, it’s easy to get caught up with everything else that’s going on and forget to even cook the ingredients. I’ve never completed a level, even the appetizers, with more than two stars, but I have had a hell of a fun time doing badly. 

Whether you have a talent for deckbuilders or you’re really unlucky when it comes to drawing cards like me, you’ll have a really fun time playing Mage Food Truck. The full game is set to release on September 24, 2025, and there’s even a bundle including Space Food Truck for a discount of 15%!