Load the truck backwards, like everyone says, and the bike arrives crushed.

The answer has two empty spaces in it

Spoilers for the demo. Try it first.

The job's brief tells you to think backwards: the storage unit is the first stop, so its things go on last, by the door. That's the bike and two boxes. The sofa, the lamp and two more boxes ride on to the house.

So you do it, and you pack it tight, the way anyone who's moved would. Sofa against the cab, bike against the sofa. Then the top row, cab to door: house boxes, the lamp, and the storage boxes last, nearest the door. Which is right on top of the bike.

The bike bears nothing. Its gauge goes red the moment a box touches it, and the claim sheet comes back at $350.

The clean load puts the bike on the floor at the door with nothing above it. Two spaces of truck sit empty, on purpose, right over the bike. (The tight load had two empty spaces too. They were at the back, where they did nothing.) The storage boxes ride deeper in, on the top row, on top of the sofa and a house box.

And they still come off first, because the top row is clear all the way to the door. Nearest the door was never the rule. A clear run to the door is.

(The sofa carries three units of weight in that load. It bears exactly three. Equal is fine.)

Two rules. You already know both.

Every item on the crew's list (the game calls it the manifest) has a size, a weight and a number for how much weight can rest on it. The game calls that last one bears.

NOTHING CRUSHES

Weight sits on whatever is under it, split evenly across the spaces it touches. A desk that weighs 3, resting half on a box and half on a trunk, puts 1.5 on each. Every placed thing shows a gauge, and if the load goes past what it bears, it's on the claim sheet. Fragile things bear zero: the TV, the bike, the lamp, the mirror.

FIRST STOP, FIRST OFF

At each stop the crew slides out that stop's things, door side first. A thing leaves only if nothing rests on it and its row is clear to the door. Anything in the way goes on the pavement and gets loaded back on. That's a re-handle: 6 minutes of the crew's day, not yours. You're never timed.

That's the whole game.

1,814,400 ways to load job 3. 230 deliver clean.

The game ships with three bots built to lose. One loads straight down the manifest. Two know the trick: last stop in first, one going heaviest first and the other biggest first. A job only made it into the game if all three miss a star on it. (On job 1, one of them gets away with it.) On job 2, both of the clever ones crush the bike.

I wanted to know how rare the right answer is, so I counted every legal way to get the whole manifest onto the truck, graded by the same rules the game uses, with matching boxes counted once:

Job 1 is the warm-up, and most loads work. Job 2 is about 1 in 30. Job 3 fills the truck to the last of its 18 spaces with 12 things, and only about 1 in 7,900 ways of doing that gets everything there in order with nothing broken. Every job has at least one clean load, and Dell, the crew boss, knows where it is.

The counting scripts are on the notes page, and they import the game's rules file directly.

Six jobs

1. Flat 2B, Linden Street. One stop. "Mind the telly." Dell teaches you here, one step at a time, and only moves on when you do the thing he asked.
2. The Ferry Road double. Two stops, one door. The demo.
3. The professor's books. Books weigh 3 and bear 4. Stack three and the bottom one bursts, so they have to lie in a row across the top.
4. The dorm drop. R turns things on their side. The fridge, the washer and the dryer refuse: they travel upright. The mattress goes in standing on its edge.
5. The Greaves estate. Ruth Greaves's things go three ways: the charity shop takes the books, then her son Tom's, then storage. Three colors, one door.
6. The piano. Twenty-four spaces and twenty-four spaces of cargo. The piano weighs 10, it travels upright, and it goes to the first stop.

If you've loaded a real truck

You'll spot what's missing, so here it is:

• The truck is drawn side-on. Every column is a full-width slice of the box, so you never pack side by side.
• No straps or blankets, and no ramp. Nothing shifts on the road.
• Weight is whole numbers. A box is 1, books are 3, a fridge is 6, the piano is 10.
• Nothing overhangs. Every space under a thing has to be floor or something else.

What it gets right: heavy goes low, fragile goes on top or alone, and the stuff you need first can't be under the stuff you need last. You knew all three. Try all three at once in an 18-space truck.

Honest gripes

• It's six jobs, and then the season's over. No random trucks, no daily.
• The full game needs a keyboard to start. The demo above works on a phone; the game doesn't, yet.
• The drive is a simple playback where things slide out the back door one at a time.
• Dell only knows one clean load per job. If you're building a different clean one, his note will tell you to lift something that was fine where it was.
• Nobody outside my test runs has played it, so I can't tell you how long it takes.