By Ryan Bretsch
February 25, 2010
Designers: Antoine Bauza and Serge Laget
Artwork: Julien Delval
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Players: 3-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 75 minutes
Rules Language: English / French / German
Mystery Express is the latest offering from Days of Wonder, a boardgame company located out Los Altos, California with offices in Paris, France. The premise of the game is based on a murder mystery, as you are working to “solve the case” as you travel by way of a well-known flagship train as it choo choo’s its way from Paris to Istanbul.
In this gaming mystery, Days of Wonder opts for a “period piece” set on the Orient Express, originally made famous by Agatha Christie as one of her best known Hercule Poirot mysteries. This is a superior move, as the romanticism behind the novel, the nostalgia of the time period and the luxury that this mythical train conjures up makes for an incomparable game setting and it becomes very easy for the players to slide into the interlude that the game creates.
Days of Wonder cements the mood of the game by calling up their secret weapon, artist Julien Delval, for the absolutely gorgeous artwork which does a very pleasing turn of inducing the rich opulence and understated indulgence that traveling in the appointments of the Orient Express wisps you away to. And Mr. Delval fits it quite properly into the art deco stylings of the era.
Mystery games take well to a great backstory…. as the best mysteries are almost always very character driven. Need examples? Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown, Colonel Mustard, Hercule Poirot, Ms. Scarlet, and even Dr. Lucky just to name a few… And to this fabled list we can now add Contessa De Mirabella, Doctor Strauss, Archibald Mansard, Colonel MacDouglas and Miss Pransky. It is easy to speak to the care that Days of Wonder has built into the character development through the efforts put into the backstory and artwork. The characters truly look to be a foundational base for putting you in a proper frame of mind to take on the challenges of sleuthing in the narrow confines of the train coaches, lights flickering in the night, as the mystery caravan speeds towards its ultimate end destination. Overall, Days of Wonder hits all of the main story points with this boardgame and opens with a tremendous, well-liked theme that will appeal to a very broad audience.
A read through of rules indicates a boardgame that should be fairly easy to learn but doesn’t appear that it will have the *very easy* to understand simplicity of Days of Wonder’s best known release, “Ticket to Ride”. The rules complexity looks to be something more akin to “Mystery of the Abbey”, meaning that the prospective players will need to set aside at least some small investment of time to grasp all of the relevant rules. I qualify this by noting that reading rules online is a little different than being able to read the rulebook outright, as it is obviously a little more convenient to flip back and forth between the pages to find needed clarity. But the rules here do seem to be well laid out and it appears that Days of Wonder will be providing their usual quick start reference aids to make sure the game doesn’t get bogged down trying to find an important rule buried deep in the larger rulebook. It swiftly becomes cozy to imagine what it will be like to pull into the various train depots during this mystery journey. After starting in Paris, the aptly named Mystery Express will look to make stops in Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna and Budapest before finally finishing its landward journey in Istanbul. Each of these stops will entail a full game turn by all players to take specific actions in the attempt to find the culprit behind the terrible, yet delightful, crime.
I can’t fully get a sense of how this game will structurally flow just by reading the rules. We’ll know more once the game is in general release. I do know the game’s re-playability factor will be contingent on a smooth game experience where the deductive elements being made are judged to be productive. The primary balance of the game involves trying to find matches within sets of cards to deduce five separate elements of the crime. Those elements include investigating the suspect, their modus operandi, their motive, the physical location of the crime and finally, the time the crime happened. So there are a lot of elements to deduce here and I think that will be a lot of fun. Time, as an element of deduction, will be handled in a slightly more in-depth manner than the other elements of the crime, as triplets of cards are in play here, versus just pairs.
Each player will also have limited “time” between destination stops to choose various actions for trying to uncover clues. In other words, for each deductive action you make, it will cost you a certain amount of “time” to investigate. So managing your allotment of “investigative time” in the right way looks to be an important factor in conducting your investigation and adds another uniquely tactical level of complexity to the game. Each player will also have a special investigation power that they will be allowed to employ to seek to gain a strategic advantage. A key design appears to be offering the individual players choices and flexibility for the manner in which they seek to deduce the pairs of cards. Each train compartment of this rolling mystery procession contributes to introducing this deductive elasticity, as each car will allow for differing means of structuring investigative tactics taken during the game turn, with separate methods for deducing cards.
For instance, in the lounge car, you may specify an action where all players, except you, must show one card of the crime category of their choice to all of the other players. Meanwhile, in the sleeping car, you will have to guess which hand another player is holding a miniature bag in. If you guess correctly, you may randomly select one card from the hand of the player of your choice, with time consequences if you wind up guessing incorrectly. As stated earlier, each of these actions have a “cost”, measured in time spent against a given turn allotment.
As long has no one train car has a consistently decided advantage of tactics from other train cars, there should be a lot of explore here from a decision making standpoint. On its surface, Mystery Express seems to have sought an effective balance of being fun to play… while being plausibly interactive.
The game components look to be A+… with all of the bells and whistles (literally) which will help immerse you in the game experience. I particularly like the fact that each of the colorful resin game pieces has a nice level of detailed, individual characterization to it. Mystery Express looks to have all the makings of having an excellent “toy factor”, which adds considerable flavor to imagining yourself as a passenger of the Mystery Express, on a bohemian journey, investigating mysterious circumstances.
To sum up, I believe that Days of Wonder will have a triumph here, something akin to “Mystery of the Abbey”. The theme and immersion of the game would lend this to being an immediate “must-buy” on my shopping list..... and short of surprises in actual gameplay it will also resolutely look to make my holiday gift giving list for 2010, as well.
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