A Card Version of the Great train Robbery

HYDERABAD: Picture this — you’re an outlaw, a scourge of the Wild West, and you’ve set off to rob a train (as all self-respecting outlaws do). However, you swing aboard the train only to find a bunch of other outlaws! Maybe there was a scheduling conflict or someone forgot to send out the memo, but you’re all trying to rob the same train at the exact same time; and there’s only so much loot to go around. That’s the premise of Colt Express, and it only gets better from there. 

Each player draws a hand of cards that tells them exactly what they can do this round. Potential actions include moving between carriages, climbing onto the roof of carriages, looting the passengers and punching/shooting the other outlaws who are all trying to do the exact same thing. However, this is more Looney Tunes than Django Unchained; and punching someone, for example, merely causes them to drop some of their ill-gotten gains before sending them flying into the next carriage.

The genius of Colt Express lies in how you resolve these actions. Every round, you’ll play a certain number of cards one at a time into a central deck. Once the last player’s played their last card, you flip the deck over and resolve each card in the order they were played. Because players are forced to program their actions based on how the board state was at the beginning of the round (and based on what they think their opponents are going to do!), things go off the rails very, very quickly. 

That tempting bit of jewellery you were planning on picking up? Somebody else got there first, leaving you with nothing. Or maybe you were about to pick up a hefty bag of cash, but somebody punched you into an empty carriage leaving you scrabbling around on the floor. That opponent you were about to punch might’ve clambered out the window, leaving you swinging blindly at thin air; but hey, she wound up climbing onto the roof right before a gunfight broke out, so she wound up with a bunch of bullet cards clogging up her deck.

Adding to the chaos are the tunnels ­­— which let you play cards face-down, because of course nobody can see anybody else in a tunnel! — and the Marshal, who just so happens to be guarding a strongbox in the locomotive and is not particularly fond of train-robbing outlaws. You don’t mess with the Marshal — you can’t shoot or punch him, heck, you can’t even stay in the same carriage as him (he just shoots you and throws you out).

But the strongbox is the most valuable piece of loot in the game and one of your cards lets you move the Marshal, so if you get him out of the locomotive and get in there yourself, you might just be able to...and then somebody else moves the Marshal back in, he shoots you and everybody laughs. You laugh too, because what goes around comes around in Colt Express; and soon, it’ll be somebody else’s turn.

There’s so much more to say about Colt Express. It doesn’t bother with a board, but comes with these wonderful 3D carriages that you put together to form the train you’ll be robbing, which is simply superb. Also, each outlaw has a special power that adds both thematic flavour as well as variability. I could go on, but you probably already know whether this is a game for you or not. So go for it! That train isn’t going to rob itself, you know...