Colt Super Express Review – The Wild West on Apple Maps

If the 2015 Spiel des Jahres Winner Colt Express is the luxury passenger train of board games, then the follow-up Colt Super Express is the two-person handcar. Gone is the wonderfully, yet finicky, cardboard train… as well as a lot of other mechanisms and components. Replaced by a deck of cards and a handful of meeples.

How to play

In Colt Super Express, everyone plays as a rootin’, tootin’, cowboy-shootin’ outlaw aboard a train. In each round, players select three cards from a hand of four. These cards will let you move from carriage to carriage, change direction, go on the roof, and shoot your gun in the direction you’re facing.

Once everyone’s created a pile of three cards, you take turns revealing the top card of each player’s pile, carrying out the action as you go. Thereby creating a comical scene of robbers shooting thin air, walking off the end of the train, and moving around the train like they’re using Apple Maps.

Players who fall off the train are eliminated. Along with anyone on the last train carriage at the end of the round, which is removed and gifted to the nearest player. This shortens the battlefield, making confrontation all the more likely the next round.

Starting in the same fashion, everyone takes back their cards and selects a new three.

This charade of a Western continues until there’s only one outlaw left, or there are no more carriages to remove. In this case, players flip over earnt carriages and count up the money they looted.

The richest outlaw wins!

Rock, paper, scissors… gun?!

Colt Super Express is the abridged version of Heart of Darkness. The first card you place each round, you’re relatively sure of the outcome. You only need to guess what a couple of other cards could be. But by the time you place your third card, you have no idea how crazy it’s going to become when they’re all carried out.

Because of this, the game gets away from you at times. Where you feel like it’s completely random, and it doesn’t matter what you play. But this is part of the charm of Colt Super Express, and its predecessor. Where the game is as much about winning and losing as it is about creating a funny puppet show for everyone to enjoy.

This is especially true when using only the base game cards, as you don’t have enough tools to get out of harm’s way. Thankfully, the game comes with two expansion cards. The horse moves you to the front of the train, and the reaction shot allows you to stand up and shoot your gun if you’ve been shot previously.

These two cards open the game up drastically, upgrading Colt Super Express from a dull board game to a decent one.

That said, rarely does the game go beyond asking: who’s going to shoot me?

Followed closely by: are they bluffing?

This is the basis of many bluffing games. But usually, you get more information to inform your decision. For instance, in Welcome to the Dungeon, you know what you’ve put into the dungeon, or in Poker you get to see the river. Meanwhile, in Colt Super Express, you get nothing. So if you abstract away the theme and programmatic elements of the game, you’re left with a complicated game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

How well does it capture its’ predecessor?

The cardboard train in Colt Express is one of the most excessive components in all of board gaming. It’s right up there with the tree from Everdell. But it had its place, it created a stage for the Wild West pantomime to be carried out.

When I played Colt Express, I kind of disliked the train because it was finicky trying to move the pieces in and out of the carriages. Now it’s gone though, you realise how much that cardboard train added to the spectacle.

So, you miss a bit of the showmanship offered by the original. But the real difference is in the gameplay. Whereas the original focused on collecting loot and programming, Colt Super Express is all about bluffing. This is due to the direct player interaction, and the last person standing win condition.

Even though it’s not a one-to-one translation it still feels very Colt Express. Once you add those additional expansion cards, you’ll have some fun with this game. But after several plays, you’ll end up wanting a bit more than the simplistic bluffing Colt Super Express offers.