Train - game
I want to write a note on this so badly, but god I’m afraid I’ll misrepresent it. Ah well, here goes.
Train is a game about efficiently getting passengers to their destination. Each turn you have some actions that allow you to take passengers from station to station getting them closer to their final destination. Once a player gets some of their passengers there, the destination is revealed: Auschwitz.
And holy crap is this a gut punch. In some ways, the game is an exploration of the extent to which people will blindly follow rules. Of course, it is a bit of a trick - players expect a lighthearted game and don’t think too much about what they are doing - but even still it really makes the players think about the casual ease with which they were playing the game.
And now the symbolism in the game makes sense, the dreary trains, the yellow pieces, the broken glass symbolism, and the game flips on its head. What a player does after they learn the reveal is the interesting bit. Do they not care? Do they stop? Do they take actions to stop the passangers, unable to save everyone?
A fantastic game for evoking the despair of The Holocaust and forcing players to reflect on their actions.
We don’t usually think about board games having “twists” since they’re usually built for replayability, so her inclusion of that sort of narrative really threw me as a way to subvert player expectations for a good reason
Upon realizing the twist, one player continued to play, roleplaying as a guard with a family to feed. There’s a lot to unpack there.
Players who knew the twist tended not to tell others.
