Welcome to Cooperative Cthulu Month! This month, we take a look at a bunch of cooperative Cthulu board and card games! We start the month with a very brand new game called Horror on the Orient Express which just delivered to Kickstarter backers!!

Horror of the Orient Express answers the age-old question: What would it be like if Agatha Christie’s Poirot had to solve a mystery on the Orient Express with Chtulu-like creatures chasing him? Philosophers have pondered this question for years, and now Horror on the Orient Express gives the definitive answer!

The game arrive at my house Saturday August 22nd. I was very excited by this; it is was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025!

Over the next week, I would spend so much of my precious time with this game system. I have spent 15+ hours going though this so far! How does that time break down? Let’s take a look!

Day 0. Unboxing and Reboxing (and some discussion of gameplay): 4 Hours

You heard me right; this took 4 hours to unbox. And that was just the base game and some deluxe components! Part of the story here is just how much content arrived! There were two boxes that were actually tapes together when delivered to my house! See above!

The smaller of the two boxes came with the base game and an investigators expansion (giving more investigators and suspects).

The bigger box came with the campaign expansion (bottom box), more monsters (green middlebox) and some deluxe components (the other two). See Coke can above for some perspective on this!

This is probably the biggest Kickstarter I have ordered in some time! And remember, here at CO-OP Gestalt, we pay for everything with our own money! See all the boxes (and a correction card) above!

In the end, I chose to only unbox the base game and deluxe components (see boxes above). I’ll come back to the others later! That seems like a sane decision, right? Just limit myself to unpunching and assembling the base box with a few extra acrylic tokens? It still took 4 hours!!!

This is a monster of a game! See coke can above for scale!

To get a sense of how much stuff is in here, the game includes a really nice boxing/unboxing guide. See above.

So much stuff!!

There were SO MANY things to punch out! See all the cardboard skeletons above!! SO MANY PUNCHOUTS! And no, I don’t think I can keep these punchout Skeletons … even if I wanted to.

Players each the role of an investigator! See the choices above.

Each investigator has their own set of “main action” cardboard punchouts. See above and below.

Each investigator is actually fairly unique: their main action cards define the flavor of the character! There’s no special power per se, but each investigator has a different pool of actions that are quite thematic!

All these cards go back into little tuck boxes (it actually makes it a lot easier to start the game).

So what are you investigating? As a group, the players cooperatively are trying to figure out which of the suspects (see the 6 suspects above) is a Cultist and which is NOT a cultist! This is cooperative Clue with Cultists and Cthulu!

Each suspect has some “luggage” with Clues on them. The nature of the stuff in their luggage tells you whether or not they are cultsists! Do they have a blood red Fez??? They must be a cultist! Are they going to Constantinople? Their stuff is an indicator that they are cultists or not! There is actually a precise definition (based on their stuff) of what makes someone a cultist!

At the start of the game, all suspects have their clues turned face down, and throughout the course of the game, there are many ways to uncover the items and see exactly which suspects ARE Cultists and which ones are NOT! You have to get them all identities correct or you lose the game! This is the primary goal of the game: discover the loyalties of all suspects!

To be clear, all the PLAYERS are in the clear automatically; there is no hidden traitor or anything like that! Players work together to find out who are the cultists!

But of course, everyone got stuck on a train that’s driving in the Dreamlands, and we have to survive the Cthuloid creatures that are chasing the train! See the creatures above and below! They are much less fearsome inside their box!

The Cthuloid creatures race alongside the train and reach in to do damage to passengers and suspects!

The train is where everything takes place! The investigators, the suspects, the monsters, the passengers, and even a vampire!

The “other passengers” (not suspects) are represented by die which show a face showing that they are happy, worried, neutral, crazy, mad, or injured! See above! You have to be careful to protect as many passengers as you can! It’s hard to talk to passengers that are mad or crazy! And you need to talk to passengers to find out about the suspects! Remember, you are an investigator!

Putting this train together (which is really cool) was actually a surprising amount of time from the 4 hour unboxing time! The instructions are “ok”, but let me give you a little hint now: BUILD FROM THE BOTTOM! See below!! The instructions (see above) show building the train cars from the top, and that just doesn’t work very well.

Build from the bottom like I did: See above.

Also, I recommend gluing the final crossbar piece (see above). They kept coming out on me!

By the time you are done building six train cars and the locomotive, you get a little exhausted. I ended up taking some time to do other stuff before I finally came back to finish my unboxing and reboxing everything back in! (And no, I don’t count that time off in the 4 hours … this really took 4 hours!!)

Oh yes, I need to comment on some of the deluxe components. The acrylic conversation tokens and event tokens from the upgrade box are really cool!!! See above!

… but they are not well-labelled! In fact, the expansion box has acrylic tokens for EVERYTHING (including other expansions), so you don’t really need ALL the acrylic tokens for the base game! And in fact, they don’t all fit if you try to use all of them!!! I ended using the unpunched cardboard tokens (see above) as a guide to which tokens to keep! This was extremely frustrating that I DID NOT know which tokens to use for the base game and which tokens to use for the campaign and other pieces! They reallllllly needed to have some better labeling.

As you put things back in the box, you will both love and hate the sheet above! Why? Because it shows everything (I love that) but it’s so hard to see detail! (I hated that!)

See above as I had to use my phone to zoom in so I could see the detail!!!

Putting everything back into the box in its proper place (after punching everything out) was a chore. But it did work.

Yep. It took me 4 hours to unbox everything, punch out so many things (see cardboard skeletons above), dig through deluxe tokens (and realize there’s no way I can put them all in the base box), assemble the train, then finally rebox!!

Whew!

Day 1. Set-Up: 2 Hours

You might ask “why did you put everything back in the box if you knew you just needed to get it all out again?” I asked myself that same question! Seriously though, there is some value in handling all the components again; there’s a kinesthetic boon to seeing/touching all the components in the game again.

If you think that 2 hours is ridiculous to set-up the game, I point you at the rulebook: setup takes about 10 pages! That’s right, about 10 pages of the 48 page rulebook is just to set-up the game.

Uh-oh. This is gonna be hard.

Day 2a. Reading Of The Rules. 2 Hours.

If you think this is a big complicated game with lots of rules … you would be correct. The rulebook is 48 pages long.

The rulebook is good, but there are a LOT of rules … a lot of rules that you will have to lookup again and again.

The rulebook does fit well on the chair next to me: it stays open and is easy to read, but there is just a little bit of drooping of the pages. I’ll give this rulebook a B+ or A- on The Chair Test; It has a good form factor.

The components pages are nice, but they span multiple pages. The actual Set-Up also spans multiple pages!

In the end, you just have to get through this rulebook. I sat with the game set-up in front of me, and read the rulebook while constantly referencing the set-up game. This rulebook kind of feels like a legal document because there are so many rules and descriptions. It’s not too bad, but it took me 2 hours to get all the way through the rulebook so that I had an idea of what was going on.

I didn’t really feel like I could jump into the game until I read just all the rules. There’s too much going on to say “let’s just try it!” Nope, that’s a recipe for disaster! You absolutely need someone to read the rules ahead of time, or you will end up reading 2 hours of rules with your friends and annoying them.

I was very pleased that the rulebook included an Index. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to help when I needed to look up something.

This was a good, if long and legalese rulebook. You will refer to it a LOT as you play.

Day 2b. Solo Game: 3 Hours

There is a solo mode (huzzah on following Saunders’ Law!)! See rulebook above. Basically, you are supposed to play 2-Handed solo, alternating between two characters.

Now, I think I misread this the first time I set-up, as I just went ahead and played true solo: I operated a single character. See set-up above. After playing with a single character, I am glad I made that mistake! There are SO MANY rules in this game, that alternating between two characters just seemed like too much work.

See above as my character advanced pretty quickly.

After accidentally playing true solo, boy, I am really glad I did! I think I would have hated alternating between two characters as I I was learning the game. There are a LOT of rules in this game, and each character has a LOT of options and main powers … I think I would have been completely overwhelmed on first game had I played 2-handed solo.

I think what I am saying is … this was a happy mistake! Maybe your first game should be a true solo game so you can get a sense of everything in the game. I know I cheated a few times in my solo game, on accident and maybe once on purpose (just to get to the later game), but I think … this might be the best way to learn?

I can’t comment too much on the balance of a solo game (because I was just playing true solo to learn the game), but I think I would prefer if the game had a true solo mode? This is hard for me to say because I frequently prefer 2-handed solo mode because they typically don’t have rules exceptions! I think this is case where a minor rules change (or two) for true solo might be worth it; it might be as simple as you start the game with a couple of items already in your inventory (one of them a healing item).

In the end, the true solo player was able to keep the Cthuloid monsters under control and accurately guess the identity of all the cultists! And it only took 3 hours!

This was a learning game, so I expected it to be longer than normal games. But it was 3 hours to play EVEN after setting everything up ahead of time! And I didn’t even tear-down, because I left it “mostly” set-up for cooperative play!

Day 3a. Cooperative Game: 3.5 Hours.

Interestingly, the game suggests that a cooperative game all sits on one side of the board. This would work fine for a 1,2 or 3 player game, but I worry that a 4 player game just wouldn’t fit? We only played a 3-Player game (above), and we just barely fit. Maybe you just need a bigger table if you play 4 players?

I am SO HAPPY that I set-up, read the rulebook, and played a preliminary game before my friends came over. We ended up playing 3.5 hours of just pure playing time! Let’s be clear: my friends and tried-and-true gamers who have played many complex games: we did not get “stuck” on anything!! The game moved along as it should with some rule lookups, but it still took 3.5 hours to play!

The game has some interesting ways to promote cooperation: for one, all spells and items are shared! That means there’s no need to worry about explicit “share” actions or anything like that! On your turn, if you want to cast a spell or use an item, you just use the shared pool and do it! There’s no “I have to move to you to give you the Book of Znik so you can use it!” You could argue it’s not thematic (how do you share items if you aren’t even in the same train car??), but it does get around all the problems of sharing and wasting actions to get stuff to each other. The fully shared paradigm does help the cooperation.

At the start of the game, most turns tend to be fairly multiplayer solitaire. Don’t get me wrong, there are mechanisms that affect other players (For example: TJ could walk his dog and have another player move with him), but players did their own thing. What I saw happen was the people kind of took their own turn and did what they wanted at the start of the game. I think this was good; it helped players become familiar with their powers, the rules, and the interactions.

What I saw happen was that as things became more dire, we started setting each other up and helping each other directly more and more.

“We really need to find out if he’s a cultist before the train reaches the end!!”
“Ya, but I have 3 cthuloids coming up behind me! I need to deal with those!”

So, in the end game, we started working together more and more. To be fair, we pretty much had to cooperate or we would have lost the game!

From this point of view, I think the game is a good cooperative game! Players have agency to learn their characters at the start of the game, but learn to cooperate as the situation gets more dire!

To be fair, it still took 3.5 hours to play a single game. Even though it was a learning game, I did everything right to make the game introduction as simple as possible (set-up, read rulebook, played solo) and it still took 3.5 hours to play!

Day 3b. Tear-down: .5 hours

After winning our 3.5 hour game, my friends helped me tear this down.

This unboxing sheet (see above) made all the difference in the world! Tearing down the game was a cooperative experience worth its own game! I saw massive parallelism as my friends and I would each take “some pieces” from the game and consolidate them into the box! Seriously, I felt like the tear-down was its own cooperative game.

Hm, I kind of wonder if how well you tear-down a game together is a measure of how well your group cooperates together? I can say with pride that my core game group works well together! Someone was always doing something and working on putting this back together!

It still took a while to put this back together.

What I Liked

Table Presence: The game looks sooo cool on the table! The train cars, the cthuloid creatures chasing the train, the vampire hanging on the windows, the amazing landscape, the characters, … everything! This just looks so epic!

Component Quality: In general, the component quality was good.

The Arc: The arc of the cooperative game was interesting and a very good development to encourage cooperation. The game starts fairly multiplayer solitaire, then converges to being much more cooperative as the game unfolds.

What I Didn’t Like

Deluxe Component Issues: I love the deluxe components, but there’s two major problems. One, there’s no discussions (especially in the fortune tokens) about which tokens you need for which box! Second, there’s no way the deluxe components can all fit in the core box. If you were hoping to have all the deluxe components fit into the base box, think again! If you wanted to throw away your deluxe component boxes … well, you may have to hold onto them longer than you expected.

The Length: I find it very very hard to believe that this game plays in 90-120 minutes. Even if you cut-off the set-up and tear-down times, the game length still feels waaaaaaay off. There are so many rules.

Colors are a little wonky: The suspects each had a colored base that helped you identify them, but they really didn’t match the suitcase colors very well. At all. The brown suitcase we think uses the orange colored base?

Cthulu Game?

Is this a Cthulu game? Well, if your definition is “Cthulu must appear”, then no, this is not a Cthulu game. Maybe the better question to ask “Is this game set in Cthulu Mythos?” Strictly speaking, the answer might still be no! The only real allusion is that the “train is driving throughthe Dreamlands”. But the vibe, the feel, the plot, everything feels like this is a Cthulu game! Then I think the answer is yes! The train has sailed into the Dreamlands, Cultists are summoning and conspiring, portals are opening …

I mean, Chaosium does Cthulu games. I am calling this a Cthulu Mythos game.

*I was going to search the rulebook for the word Cthulu and Cultists, but the PDF rulebook in the BGG files section IS NOT SEARCHABLE. They need to fix that.

Reactions

Andrew thought it was fun, but was worried that the time-investment vs. fun wasn’t good enough. His point was that there are a lot of rules and the game is really long. We had fun playing for 3.5 hours, but there’s many games we could play that are half that time but arguably more fun.

Teresa liked it and would play again. This would make one of her top Cthulu games.

Conclusion

Horror on the Orient Express is a monster of a game … in every conceivable notion! It’s a monster of a box, with big monsters, a monster 48-page rulebook, a monster set-up and tear-down time, and a monster playtime of at least 3 hours. You have to decide if the monster aspects might be too much for you!

I would call this Cooperative Cthulu Clue, as it’s a deduction game where you flip clues, but that would lure you into thinking this is a simple replacement for Clue! Absolutely not! Horror on the Orient Express is a deduction game where you worry about investigating while also fighting monsters and fighting vampires and saving passengers and basically keeping spinning plates going! There’s a lot going on! If you have always wanted something more complex than Clue set in a cooperative environment and fighting monsters, then maybe this is right for you! But don’t be lulled into a simple “Oh this is just Cooperative Cthulu Clue!” No! It’s so much more! And that’s good or bad, depending on whether you you like this world.

If you like living in a Cthulu-esque world of monsters and cultsists, then Horror on the Orient Express nails the theme! If you live that theme, you will love this world. If you just like the theme, you need to decide if the overwhelming nature of the rulebook, the game, the box, the length may be too much for you.

I look forward to playing this with some friends in Las Cruces, as they love Cooperative Cthulu Mythos games! I know a few will blanche at the length and complexity, while others will embrace this monster of a game! Hopefully this review will help you decide if this is for you or not.