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It’s Not Murder!
The first thing to say about Carla & Jeff Horger’s excellent game is that it has nothing to do with Murder or Poirot though you might have to use your little grey cells in it to prevail!
As it happens I also have the 1987 Spiel des Jahres “Beautiful Game” winner Orient Express which is a murder mystery game. The current Orient Express is more akin to Ticket to Ride Europe and should be particularly appealing to you if you’re the person who gets frustrated trying to collect the right cards for your track.
Making Tracks
You don’t need to collect cards to lay tracks here and each turn you must lay 1 to 3 pieces of your 35 track segments or pick 1 to 3 pieces up again. You are doing this to complete routes between cities on the splendid map of Europe. Note that whilst the map itself is a geographically accurate standard Mercator projection of Europe and Turkey the routes will be laid on a geometric triangular grid which sacrifices realism for functionality. It makes track laying straightforward and it’s easy to calculate the pieces you’ll need to complete a specific route but it does mean some cities have been displaced a tad to fit in.
Track can be laid anywhere there isn’t already track laid and there’s no requirement to immediately link it to your other tracks or anywhere else. Certain lines cross water and are designated Ferry Points. To lay track here you must spend 1 of the 10 Entry Waiver Cubes you’re given at game start. There is only 1 tunnel in Orient Express: the Channel Tunnel which can only be constucted after the mid-point of the game and costs 2 Tracks and 1 Cube
Privatisation vs Nationalisation
Players represent moguls of private enterprise building their networks to reap the rewards offered. These are presented on Passenger Cards a bit like the Destination Cards in TTR but unlike their linking of 2 cities the Passenger Cards will have 4 destinations to link in a chain. This chain can be as long as you like as long as it touches all 4 of the cities. You show your card to the other players who confirm your route and place the card in front of you for end of game scoring and take a replacement card. The further the cities are apart the more points they’ll be worth. Your coloured tracks remain in place and can be used again in future Passenger Card routes.
The alternative to this is playing a Regional Card. The map is divided into 9 Regions from Iberia to Russia, The Balkans to the British Isles and there is a pack of Regional routes for each. These can be from as few as 2 to a maximum of 8 destinations but more usually are from 3-6. Like the Passenger Card routes you score the corresponding points for completion but unlike them after claiming the card your tracks are lifted. This represents not physical destruction but your track being taken into public ownership and, as such, the cards carry quasi realistic names like TrenItalia, Europorte or, more prosaically, East Coast Mail Line. As compensation for the loss of control of your track you can take the highest available Nationalism token for that region gaining 4, 2 or 1 Victory Points.
When completing either type of card you can use up to 5 segments of track belonging to other players. You must pay 1 Entry Waiver Cube for each piece of track so used to the owning player. If it is a Regional Card their track is not removed.
Stick or Twist
So this is the main dynamic of Orient Express. You quickly build a network at 3 tracks a turn, and then milk it through different combinations of Passenger Cards and then finally, usually when you are running out of track segments, sell it off via a Regional Card to take the best Nationalism token.
The emptying out of the Nationalism tokens is also the trigger for game end and all your accumulated points can be totted up. There are also 3 randomly drawn Bonus Cards that players can claim during the game for things like Dominance in a Region or building special glamour routes such as the eponymous Orient Express.
Incidentally this is the only way the Orient Express itself will come into the game and it has only a 1 in 7 chance of even coming up at all. This in no way detracts from the engaging game play but does mean the title, with the sub-title “The World’s Most Famous Train” is unrepresentative and strikes me as marketing holding sway over the design team. A better title might be Euro Route Express?
Final Call for the Orient Express
Orient Express is a great game, the rules are simple and the turns are quick. There’s enough to think about without getting stuck in Analysis Paralysis. If I have a criticism it is that it can go on a bit past it’s peak excitement when you end up churning through Regional Cards to trigger game end but this could be easily rectified by reducing the number of Nationalism tokens required.
It can also be hard, sometimes, to locate cities. This is because: not everybody has that great a geographical knowledge of European cities; they’ve often been somewhat displaced; they get hidden by the 3D track pieces particularly in dense traffic areas and their names are written in the local language which may not be even correct! I can’t vough for the Russian names but I certainly know being born in Wales that Cardiff in Welsh Is Caerdydd not Caredydd though, to be fair, this is probably a typo.
The designers have put a lot of effort in trying to get the full railway feel to shine through and have succeeded. There is an interesting page of notes on some of their realism v gameplay choices and I feel they have come up with the right ones except for maybe the title!
This was a game that had almost slipped under my radar but I’m very glad I have it now. If you like railways in general and TTR in particular try Orient Express you’ll have a pleasant trip.