Horror on the Orient Express Review: Lovecrafts on a Train!

0:00 All right, buckle up. Let's take a journey back 10-11 years ago to when a game called Mansions of Madness second edition was announced. Now, I had played Mansions of Madness first edition and I heard about second edition. I was like, this is amazing. The app does things for you. It makes it amazing. And it introduced me into this world between it and Eldritch Horror, Arkham Horror, of Lovecraftian horror, right? To the point where on my 30th birthday, which sounds like it wasn't that long ago, but it was. Um I got Call of Cthulhu the RPG, right? The the the tabletop RPG, the TTRPG as it were. And I fell in love with this uh Chaosium product and I absolutely adored it. It's been fantastic. So, fast forward to 2 years ago. I'm just entering my master's program and I decide, you know what? I'm going to back this game. Maybe it'll come out, maybe it won't. I figured it would come out.

0:49 Called Horror on the Orient Express. And it came in this month. And oh my gosh, I was excited. The box is huge. Takes up an entire Kallax shelf. It looks exciting. It looks so interesting. But is it? Well, we're going to find out today. Today I am happy to review Horror on the Orient Express from Chaosium. Now, let me say going into this overview, it's a monster. It is a 22-minute overview. Now, some of you are going to be like, well, Brian, that was that was a heck of a lot of an overview for a full teach. Well, it's it's not a full teach It is a full teach. Like I teach you how to play the game. We're doing But it is not in the sense of like if you watch, you know, there's bullet points A123.

1:35 It's 22 minutes cuz I show you and tell you about every aspect of the game except one I noticed. The little name tag that goes above your character's name, like a witchy or innovative or whatever, right above your character's placard. There's a name tag that has a starting power on it. It's the only thing I didn't mention. Everything else, you can watch the video a a times and you can learn how to play this game. Now, why did I spend a 22-minute teach for this game? Because the only other videos that are out right now that I've seen on this are play and teaches. Now, I think play and teaches are great, but to me, I need to know how to play the game in 20-30 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, right? I appreciate those who are like, "Well, we'll teach that as we come to it." But, man, I wanted other people to be able to look and go, "Here's all the components, here's what everything does, here's how it plays." So, 22 minutes worth of an overview, sit back, get some popcorn, and enjoy, and we'll come back up talk final thoughts.

2:30 [whistles]

2:40 All right, this is Horror on the Orient Express. Now, it is set up, we just finished the game, and there's a lot going on here. So, I'm going to try to give the best overview I can all while showing you all the components. Let's talk about major features of the game. First, there's the game board, which is the Orient Express, the train itself. Couple different things to notice on here, the locomotive, the six cars. The cars themselves can be in random order, but what the cars are is always the same. So, you'll have this reference card here. So, the first class sleeping car will start with curtains closed and these type of passengers on it. Dice on the board are passengers. They're never rolled, they're just turned and manipulated. Now, you'll notice we got a lot of happy passengers out here. That's a rarity.

3:26 You notice also the square bases, those are the six suspects, which are 1 2 3 4 5 6. Now, the only reason I knocked this game, in a little bit you'll see, is orange is brown, and this orange here does not quite line up with the color on the mat here of red, and this yellow is actually or this orange is kind of that yellow. So, they don't quite line up, so you just kind of have to look at the face symbols. The way it works is there are eight spaces on every car, four on the locomotive. One of the things you can do later is kind of move around the cars left to right. Two spaces at a time. Now, we're going to talk about action phase and everything. I just want to give you the whole grand scale first. The point of the locomotive is that it adjust the train speed. Now, we're sitting at a three. Now, that doesn't mean you do anything differently with the train. It just means that the main mechanic of mayhem and chaos and mythos comes from this bag here.

4:21 You'll pull tokens out of the bag and they will do different things. Like, the green one would move the train ahead one extra space. If it's green, you keep drawing. If it's red, you stop. If it's yellow or black and yellow, you put it out here on the board. Now, let's talk through a turn first rather than try to explain all the different things. You will have a player board here with a character with sanity, stamina, and health. Your skills are all here. You will start with your um level one skills of your character and a random generic skill, and then you can upgrade by gaining new skills or upgrading these into level two skills. Now, let's talk about this. On your turn, you're going to do a main action. That means taking your leftmost cube, putting it on an action here, doing that action, whatever it says and we'll talk about what they are in a minute, and then two basic actions, which will be listed here. All of these are the same except every character has their own unique basic action down here. So, the gunfighter here, obviously more able to deal with enemies.

5:20 That's what I really have noticed is that your character builds can make or break your play of this game because if you don't have someone to eliminate certain types of things, ways to lose in the game, it's pretty difficult. So, you kind of look for that. The last action down here is rest. Now, rest is always available and what it does is you restore five of your stamina because all of your basic actions except the spell cost stamina. So, you restore your stamina and then for each check you have that means the longer you've waited, you can either upgrade a certain ability that has a cube on it, you can gain a new ability, or you can gain an occult token. Now, the occult board, I'll show you really quick, is a separate sideboard, and there's a lot of sideboards in this game.

6:06 Separate sideboard here, that is where your grim war is. So, you pull the tokens, and as the last token comes off, you'll put a new spell down. And so, your grim war will contain all the different spells, six in the game, but there are more than six spells, so you don't know which six you're going to get throughout the game. You can move suspects around, your investigators around, and passengers around. Now, let's talk about that, the different actions here. Talk. So, what are you trying to do? The way you win, there's one way to win the game. You get from the beginning all the way to Constantinople, and you're able to identify which of the passenger, or sorry, which of the suspects are cultists or not. There is a minimum of one and a maximum of six, and you don't know what it is. It's very rare that it'll be just one. It'll be very rare that it's just six. But, the way it works is through this rubric.

6:58 Because all of these tokens are randomly assigned based on the board, so you put a desire token here, uh an object or a interest token there, and a ticket token there. And they're all different. And who the passenger is is different. So, this guy's not always the gray passenger. So, you'll notice that there are blanks to put the tokens out, and they're randomized, and they're put face down. Now, they're face up now because we played the game, but you notice these two are face down. The main way you find this information out, and again, this is not a super fighting game. There is a fighting mechanic in it, but it's mostly like Clue, cuz you're investigating. So, there's the talk action. So, mine is talk four, so I will immediately pull four tokens out of the talk bag. Boom. There's my four tokens out of the talk bag to start with. Now, I can choose which of these four to put back in the bag at first. And then, normally, you then push your luck. Now, the reason you're pushing your luck is you're trying to get pairs.

7:48 So, okay. Still don't have a pair. Reds are negative negatives if you fail the talk. Greens are positives. So, we currently don't have any pairs. So, I feel no reason not to keep going. Okay, we have a pair now. What causes a failure is there are three of each of these tokens in the bag of the types of things. So, they would be the three different um token types. And then first-class passenger, second-class passenger. If you pull a third one out, you fail. So, in this case, I might want to just stop here and think, "Okay, I'm only going to get to turn over a uh eyeball of one of the suspects." The other thing is everybody's talk features a different type of passenger you can talk to. So, I can talk to calm or angry. And I beat him up a little bit. So, if I fail, I damage the character, the passenger.

8:34 So, as you pull those out, you'll keep pulling them out, keep pulling them out. Now, it's also interesting with rough talk over here with this character, I have to pull two at a time. So, it makes it a little more difficult. So, it's easier to fail if I'm having to pull two tokens at a time. So, like now we have two of those, two of those. Let's just keep going see how soon it would be to fail. Those are benefits. So, I would gain an item and a favor. There we go. I now have Well, that's an incredible draw. I don't have three of anything at this point. I would stop there. Then what you'll do is you'll choose tokens to flip over. You're talking to the passenger about the suspects. And so, you can talk to a specific passenger about any suspect. So, we may want to flip an eyeball here. Uh a desire here, which is the ear. A ticket token here. What we're trying to figure out is a couple things. First and foremost, I'll tell you the most interesting part of it is the first desire token, that's the light blue, that's turned over. You will take a card that's a quest card, and you'll stick it under this. So, this one was a book. So, we now have a book card under this thing.

9:31 If you know it's a cultist, you can do what's called handling the cultist, where you have all of the tokens flipped, and then you handle the cultist and you get a benefit for that. If you don't know and you're thinking, "Ah, I'm just going to do the quest anyway." So, it says this suspect desires an item that's a book. So, if you have an item that's a book, you have it, you can go and do one of the basic actions to fulfill this quest and you turn it over. Now, then you turn over all the tokens. So, it's actually a gamble, but if you're wrong, bad things happen with the ritual. And again, the ritual is another side board and there multiple ones over here that take place throughout the game and are related to the tokens and bad things happening. It's kind of your scenario. Even really and truly the scenarios aren't that overarching. The game is overarching. So, you're trying to turn over the symbols. You're trying to do the quest. Now, the next thing you can do on this board that's interesting are these items. You can ask about an item. So, here's the ornate tin of snuff. Over here, you have a bunch of cards with the different items. You're going to choose one of those that matches. We've got multiple ornate tins of snuff. Turn it over and read it. These are always good things. Now, there's sometimes are things you don't need, but they're always good things. Now, let's talk about how you know who is a cultist or not.

10:38 Again, there can be maximum of six, minimum of one. Here's why there's a minimum of one. The blood red fez token is out there. Someone has it. So, whoever has it is guaranteed they are a cultist. Now, the rest of them, because again, it's all randomized, gets a little funky. So, in order to be a herald, they would have to be going to Constantinople here. They would have to have the chalice. So, here right here. This person is a herald because they're going to Constantinople, they have a chalice, but they do not have an elder sign. Now, over here, this one has an elder sign and is going Constantinople. So, even if they had this, they wouldn't necessarily not be a cultist, but most likely they wouldn't. The other way you can be a cultist is by having four green tokens. Now, this person has four green tokens. So, it really doesn't matter what else they have or don't have because we now know she's a cultist.

11:27 One cool wrinkle that I'm going to talk about right now is the fact that we are playing with the expansion with the uh Investigators Unveiled. So, this lady and this guy are actually main characters in the base game, but with the Investigators Unveiled, you can actually make the characters you play as in the base game be suspects and the suspects you play as in the base game or play against in the base game be characters. So, it's pretty cool. Now, let's talk about the Blood Red Fez Blood Red Fez before we go on to more actions. We're still in the middle of talk, right? So, let's say you flip this over. Well, then you take the Blood Red Fez card, which is This is a Fez Council. You'll take the Blood Red Fez card. It's got rules on it that tell you what to do for that game. Here it is. It's a It's It's got rules for what to do when the Fez happens.

12:13 You'll follow this. You'll then draw Fez Council cards up to the limit of players. Everybody gets one. And you will decide together which one of these to put into play. These are game wrinkles. They're game rules. They're They're fun things that can happen and they're funky things that can happen that involve Sometimes you take the Fez and wear it. Sometimes you burn the Fez. All sorts of crazy stuff can happen. But again, let me reiterate one more time the way to win the game cuz there's only one way to win is get all the way to Constantinople and know exactly who is a cultist and who's not. If you're wrong, you lose. If you don't get to Constantinople, you lose. Let's talk about the other ways to lose really quick. There are a bunch of monsters over there. I'll pull the camera you can see them. Red, blue, and green. If you ever have to put a monster out and you can't put a monster out, you lose.

12:59 If you ever run out of sanity, you lose. One person. If you ever need to put a coffin on a dead passenger and you don't have enough coffins left, you lose. If you ever need to put more essence out than essence out is, you lose. If you're incorrect when it comes to passengers, you lose. If your character's a single character dies, you lose. Now that we know how to do that, let's talk about what you're doing. So, at At of the game, you start back here and none of these tiles are flipped over yet. I'm just showing you cuz it doesn't really matter right now. And on your turn, you'll take that main action we talked about, then you'll take the two basic actions. The other basic The other main actions would be things like push, where you will push an enemy. So, let's just say the enemy's sitting behind here. Let's say I'm in this car, and I push this enemy.

13:46 At base, a push zero because the train speed is starts at one, this enemy will move back one space. Now, because the train speed is three, and I have pushed one, it's one plus the train speed, which would push four. If an enemy is pushed off the back of the train, it dies. That's the easiest way to kill enemies. There are other ways to just kill enemies. The other thing you can do is stun an enemy. And this is just kind of a mitigation waiting factor. Let's say I stun this enemy. It goes over here. Now, once we've done stun, I'll I'll talk about what happens with that in a minute. Let's go through the rest of these main actions. The other main actions you can do besides push and kill and talk would be manipulating the board. You can pull people to you. You can pull suspects to you. You can move suspects. These are all kind of the main actions. And again, everyone plays really, really differently.

14:37 The preacher lady, she soothes people a lot better. The crime writer has a way to manipulate people and pull them in, draw them in. The The fighter here has a way to really get rid of monsters. The vaudeville The vaudeville stuntman, he has a way to pull these essences off the board really well. Some people allow things like these block tokens, and others don't even have that. The last game we played didn't even have these block tokens available to us. Sometimes it's easier to pull occult tokens off the grimoire, and sometimes it's not. Now, those are the main actions, and there's probably a couple more that that have if They're based on your tokens here, your skills. But they're all the same main actions. Now, second thing is the basic actions. For the cost of a stamina, you can move up to two cars. If the car is ever full, you can swap a character for where you want to move into. You can use an item. You can open or close the curtains. This is one of the coolest mechanics I've ever seen.

15:34 Curtains on the train and it matters. It's not just um cosmetic. You can use a train action. You'll notice that these three cars have train actions available to them. I'm not going to zoom in where you can read them all. I'll just tell you what they say. First class sleeping car says, "If you don't have an item" and items are shared between everybody, "gain an item." Gather one suspect, one passenger, or one investigator to your spot. And over here is if there's no suspects there, reveal a ticket token. Now, you want to do that, like I said, because that'll help you identify if someone is the Herald or not because you know if they got Constantinople, but you see this cup and they don't have an elder sign, well, then they are a Herald. Um you have interact with suspects. Now, this is the most fun part of the game to me of the basic actions. You can use a favor. You'll notice this one's turned over with an X on it.

16:21 That means her favor's already been used. You would then use the favor. Like they're different powers. Like this guy's interesting. He came from the expansion and he adds extra tokens to the bag, which we're going to talk about in a minute. Not the talk bag, but the end of round bag here. Um he does that. This one will move and defeat enemies. This one will push. This one will help calm passengers down because there is a progression of the way passengers are. It's damaged to horrified to insane to calm to happy to angry. Now, that is not like a progression of emotions. It's just a progression of game mechanics because some things will say, "Turn this type into this." And then it'll show two different types and it'll say, "Turn this, if there are none essentially, turn this into this or kill this or do whatever."

17:06 Fulfill a quest. That's what we talked about earlier. If you have the stuff for these quests to be fulfilled, you can fulfill it. Now, remember, if you fulfill a quest for someone you think is not a cultist and and are, you'll still flip over of tokens and find out if they're cultists and then you'll read it if it's for a cultist or not. The other thing would be ask about an item. So, with this is the thing I mentioned. You go here, we've got the brass doorknob, you'll go to the card deck, open up the card, pull it out and read it. There are other things on these cards too that are really interesting. There are story cards and these some of these item cards will tell you to read a story card. Now, you'll notice it'll say like read card 16. Well, there are five different 16 cards here, which is really interesting cuz it again varies the gameplay a whole lot. At the end of your turn, once you've done your two basic actions and your main action in any order. That could be main, basic, basic, basic, basic, main, or basic, main, basic.

17:59 You then do the end of round phase. So, first, you're going to pull a token out of this bag here. Out of the event bag. And I'll show you what they all do here in a second. Boom. We now have this portal that goes here. It's a one dot, so it goes in the one dot spot. Now, normally, if there's nothing here, nothing really happens and then you move the train forward one space. If this occurs and there are now three tokens covering spaces on the board, you then resolve all of this. So, starting with the top, this would be resolve any active portals with the little letter under it, the words under it. So, an active portal is a portal that has essence on it. Now, some of these are always permanently printed. So, that one will always happen no matter what. The ones with essence like that are not permanent, so you don't have to do those as much.

18:45 But, that would be okay. Banish the frontmost curtain. In each curtain place with a open curtain or open window, lose a favor. And you just read all the way through and do them. Then, you have this one and this is the same under these three and this one's move monsters. Monsters will activate and they activate based on this. So, all red monsters will activate. The frontmost green monster will activate and then spawn a blue monster on each blue monster spawn space with a essence eye. Let's look at the monster cards. They do go in order here. And the order is determined by that starting space there. And again, all these tiles are different every time you play. So, you have the absorber, you have the Arnoch Arnoch, and then you have the scissor scissor. And what they do is right here. When they activate, they do this. So, each investigator loses sanity. And everything unless specified is local.

19:36 So, that would mean if the monster is outside of your window, so let's say we're right here, you would lose a sanity for that. Then, turn someone to insane. And then, all insane passengers move ahead. If a monster was ever in a space where there were no were no passengers, so say here, it would move ahead two spaces. If it gets to the locomotive, you then have these monsters unleash cards which do some pretty nasty things. Let's take a look at just one so it's not a super spoiler. Beast unleashed. This monster moves to the pursuit area. News of new monsters of this color spawns by the middle train. So, it moves monsters ahead. So, it's just kind of a new rule. The pursuit area is here, and we'll get there in a minute. So, that's the monster token. Next is the ritual token. Because it spawns, you do this part. You will see cards tokens like this, which means you will do this part as well. If anything's green, again, you keep drawing. If it's red, you stop drawing.

20:27 If it's black or yellow, you may not have to do anything else, but sometimes you will. So, in this one for whom the bell tolls, you'll place a ritual token here. And then, each car with a dead person, which is the coffin, you'll flip a blue to a calm to a horrified or whatever they call it, panicked. If you pull the red token or the green token, you'll do this. And this one's interesting. You'll get to reveal an ear token, which is good. It's a benefit. And then, for every ritual token you have here, you will start from the top and then do these in order. Boom boom boom boom boom. And it really manipulates your characters. Now, they're all different, again. The one last night, black magic, has a deck of cards where you when you do this, you flip it over and read the card. That's pretty cool. Here is the passenger card deck. You'll take the top passenger card deck and you'll read it out. It's always bad into the nightmare in each sleeping car.

21:14 Add one new panicked dice. Do not add them here if there's no empty space. And then each and suspect in a car with four or more passengers moves forward. You put that on the bottom. Now, let's go through the rest of these event tokens really quick. You have the train movement. Now again, at the end of this, the train is already going to move, but if you pull this token out, it means pull the train forward one. Let's see what else is in here cuz those are the main ones. Oh yeah, and then the train token. There are ways to get more of these tokens into the bag uh through spells, through people's abilities like this guy, the the diplomat, which makes it a little better for you because a lot of times you get to choose which one's going there and you can see there are a whole lot of tokens that can go in here. Some of them are the Grim War ones, which allow you to do spell things. Uh this one will give you occult tokens.

22:04 This one will will sit on the slot for the vampire, but it won't activate it. Now let's talk about the vampire cuz it's the only one we didn't talk about. You'll notice there's a vampire hanging off the car right here. There's a whole 'nother side board for the vampire. They will activate like this. In cars with closed curtains cuz again, you know, vampires don't like daylight. Um broken ones die. So if you see somebody who's injured, they die. Panicked ones die because we had to remove one of these. If he ever kills anybody, he gets a bite, you pull the leftmost of these off making him stronger like a vampire. If you just will keep moving down this until he does act. If for some reason he's in there with no passengers, he'll just move. But once he kills one passenger, he will move right or left depending on his token.

22:51 Then at the end, you'll move the train, but before you do that, you put any enemies in pursuit on the train. Now,

22:58 [clears throat]

22:59 that's essentially everything in the game. That's a lot, I know, and everything combos, everything leads to another thing, another card. But really and truly that's it. You're going to take your main action, you're going to take your two basic actions. Talking is very important cuz it flips up more of these tokens. You're going to be mitigating monsters getting on your thing cuz they are deadly. Cuz they'll attack your sanity, they'll attack your health. You're going to try to get essence off these boards right here. You're going to try to calm passengers down so they don't die. And essentially just survive till the end of the round. One of the things I would recommend is once you know or have a pretty good idea of who's who, turn that train speed up because then you throw these other tokens in there so it moves the train. Like I said, you always move it once at the end of the round, but each time you draw one of these, you can essentially move the train up to four times in a round.

23:49 One other thing though, when you enter a space with one of these new places, so let's say it'll be like this. This is face down and the rest of these would be face out at the beginning of the game. But as soon as your train enters that area, you flip it over. Now, sometimes they'll have an on reveal power, and sometimes it just you add essence. Now, the way essence works is it's This one gets two, that one gets one, plus one for every insane character. Now again, last night, we did not have any way to mitigate insanity. Another time we played, we did. We had a spell that would turn insane people, if you're unstable, into healthy people. So, let's talk about unstable. Notice I have my glass cracked here. Normally, you're sitting here with your sanity all in a line here based on the starting amount. He starts with one missing. Once you get here and reveal this, you're unstable.

24:39 Which seems bad, but if you played Call of Cthulhu, you know that sometimes that's a good thing because you're then all your spells start doing more powerful effects. So, normally you could take an insane and turn it to panicked. Now, you can take an insane and turn it to happy. This one has gained those favors better. So, the spells are really good, but like I said, depending on what you have in the game, it's harder or easier to get more spells out or to get essence pulled or to get you know, help people be not insane. It is a fantastic game. That's the longest overview of a game I've ever done, and I'm sure there are things that I'm not quite touching on and missing, but there are no dice you roll. You pull everything out of a bag. Push your luck with talking, which is to me the main mechanic. And you just try to stay alive through all the different ways to stay alive.

25:24 That is Horror on the Orient Express. All right, that is Horror on the Orient Express. I wanted so badly to enjoy this game. I wanted so badly to enjoy this game. And I did. It is amazing. I'm going to go ahead and tell you now, this is game of the year for me material. I love this game. I don't just love it because I sunk cost into it and backed it, right? I know that sometimes shades us when we have to what we call um uh sour gra- shoot, what is it called? Sweet lemons, right? We have to go sweet lemons, where it's like, "Ah, well, it's you know, I wanted to like it, but you know, I like this about No, this is all straight lemonade, baby.

26:14 Let's talk about presentation. Now, you know if you've seen the game, it's Is that the Cthulhu train game? That's what people think, right? And everybody has asked, "Is this a train game that's Cthulhu?" Well, no. It's on a train. Uh there are train cars, there's a locomotive, but no, it is not. Is it like Mansions of Madness? Well, kind of, right? You're investigators, and you're trying to find a mystery. Well, is it a pre-planned mystery where you can't play it again? No. Let me start with presentation, and then I'll get into all that. First of all, table presence is a 10 out of 10. The game looks incredible when you see it. You see the train, you see the curtains that move, you see the monster, you see the vampire hanging off of it, you see the investigators, and then you see the suspects which are clearly different bases, you instantly know those are two different types of things, you see the dice, you see the coffins, you see all the side boards, you see the wonderful art, you see the beautiful cards, you see the player boards with the two layers and the thoughtful enough that there's holes cut out in the corner of each one where you just and it pops up to put stuff in.

27:16 The game's presentation is amazing. It's beautiful, it looks good, the game trays are really nice, the guide to put it in the second or third time is really easy to follow. It is phenomenally produced. 10 out of 10 on production of this game. The play. How does it feel? Well, my first thought was, well, how are you going to do a mystery that is replayable that doesn't feel like some of those card games where it's more of an abstract puzzle. Well, they did it somehow. I don't [clears throat] know how they did it, but they did it, you know? I I feel like run for it, Marty. I don't know how they found us, but they found us. Run for it, you know? That's what I feel like, but they did it. There are six suspects. And sure, they're different characters, right? That's not as important. But you have these tokens that you deal out and shuffle out. And in your mind, if you're like me, you think, oh, dang. You're just finding out what's on the back of tokens and and you just kind of sussing it out from there or you're doing process of elimination.

28:13 There is something magical about the fact that you can only turn over a couple of these tokens at a time, and you know what to look for. Well, they got the blood red fez, they're cultists. If they got four green signs, they're cultists. My favorite though is the fact that the herald is there, and that creates such an interesting thinky puzzle wrinkle. Now, in Mansions of Madness second edition and first edition, I loved the logic puzzles. And what's so funny about this is the main mechanic of winning the game is a logic puzzle. You have three charac- three types of cultists it could be, and you have all the tokens. And by the end of it you go, "You know what? We don't know what that person is. They may have four green tokens." Or, you know, okay, I know these tokens are in the game. Now, if you ask me, I think

28:59 [clears throat]

28:59 an even harder mode, and I don't know if it's mentioned in the rulebook, but a harder mode for this would be to don't play with the sheets to tell you what what tokens are in there. Now, yeah, I know, you can't suss it out then. You can't be like, "I know exactly who's a cultist." And maybe that takes away from the theme, but I don't know. I'm curious to play this in a way that you have to remember. Wait a minute, wait a minute, are there's there's two chalices, there's three elder signs, uh shoot, how many how many of those have been flipped? Man, it's so good. That mechanic of finding out who's a cultist, it just works. I don't know, but it works. The game play, the actions, the six ways to lose and one way to win, or however many ways to lose it is, is so well thought out, right? Well, we got to take care of the monsters, but it's not a fighting game. We got to take care of this essence, well, it's not Pandemic.

29:45 Uh we got to make sure our passenger survive, well, it's not Dice Hospital. We got to make sure that we get to the end of the track and know who's who, well, it's not Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. No, it's a beautiful gumbo of all those things, and it's handled so well. This game is I'm going to go and tell you the final score, it's a nine out of 10. Now, why is it a nine out of 10 not a 10 out of 10? The only thing I knock it for are two things. One [clears throat] is a production quibble that really can't be fixed now because there's a deck of cards that uses this and the the vampire board. Now, yeah, you could say, "Okay, we're going to reissue two things. We're going to reissue a new rulebook, a deck of cards, and the vampire board." And when I say a new rulebook, really and truly, it's just a reference guide because the colors don't quite match. It's not bad, and they all have symbols, right? So, really and truly, I shouldn't be quibbling about that because the symbols there, but the problem is panicked and angry from a distance look really similar.

30:41 And so, looking at the card and then looking at like which symbol is that insane makes it a little difficult. It's not hard, but it's just in the moment it's like, "Ah, crud." That that takes like five extra seconds or three extra seconds each time. That's the only thing. The only other quibble I have with it, and really and truly, it's part of the beauty of the game, but it's going to deter some people from playing. This is a monster to set up because you have to pick your characters, set up your characters. You have to set up the main board. That's actually not so bad. You get the starting tile, all the other tiles based on the little thing, and I didn't show it in the review, but there's like six different setups you could do, right? And you have to set that up. You have to set the train up. You have to set the suspects up with the characters on it, put the miniatures out there, put the dice out there based on the trains, and then you have to go through and set up all the tiles shuffled up onto the board. Now, granted, you store them where you can get to them easily, but the game to set up is 20 minutes minimum. It's it's a long one. You need time. And that's 20 minutes minimum if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it's like, "Good gosh, what do the monsters on leash cards even do, right?" And then there's some tokens and components that you don't use unless you're playing with certain characters or expansion, and not even expansion, certain characters, certain powers.

31:51 Is it a real knock? I don't know. You can call me unfair for that, but because it takes so long to set up and because there's those component quibbles, it's a nine out of 10. Does that mean it's not a good game? No, a nine out of 10 is seal of excellence. It is incredible. This is probably going to be my game of the year. I cannot tell you from the moment go, I was like, "I love this game." And it's not one of those where I have a first impression and I go, "Ah, okay, I love it. I want to love it. I want to love it. Ah, I don't like it." No. It built and built and built and built, and none of your There are a couple times where basic actions can feel wasted cuz you just can't get to anywhere to do it, but you know you need to, but you need three and you only get two. Not a big deal. That's a frustration mechanic built in, and it makes sense. You can't just have a limitless time as the train is careening through the waste uh through the dreamlands. You need a little frustration mechanic to hit it. Also, the talk mechanic to me is beautiful.

32:45 How do we abstract the number one thing of Call of Cthulhu, talking and conversing and investigating into something that is board game-able? Well, push your luck. I love it. And I loved it like the gunfighter roughs them up, which means if you fail, you have punched him too hard and you damage him. This game is a masterpiece. I don't know how they did it. I don't I'll be honest, I don't know what was made by this designer before this game. All I know is this is a just sailed right over the fence. Home run game. And I want to see more. Oh my gosh, this game because it's a monster to set up, it's going to be a detriment to some, but I promise you, the experience of playing this game is oh my gosh, so good. So, that is Call of Cthulhu's Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game. I'm Brian Drake here on the Dice Tower. Make sure to follow us on Instagram and text my Drake saying until next time. Actually, we'll see some of y'all in a couple weeks at the retreat. We'll see you.

33:44 Hey everybody, thanks for watching another video from the Dice Tower. Hey, do you want to learn more about us, communicate with us? We have a Facebook group. We have a Discord channel. Lots of different ways to get involved with the Dice Tower. You can find that in our link tree link below. So, just click that and it will take you and you can communicate with us on Facebook, join our Facebook groups. There's lots of cool things that you can find and become part of the Dice Tower. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Tom Vasel.