One of the most celebrated horror RPG campaigns ever written has made the jump to the board game table. Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game, published by Chaosium and designed by Adam Kwapinski alongside Michal Golab Golebiowski, raised over $3 million from nearly 15,000 backers across Kickstarter and Gamefound. It is now arriving in backers' hands, with a retail price of $170 (roughly £135).
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Find events near youKwapinski is best known for designing Nemesis, the sci-fi survival horror game that sits inside the top 20 on BoardGameGeek's all-time rankings. Co-designer Golebiowski co-created Destinies with Filip Milunski, the app-driven adventure game from Lucky Duck Games. Between them, they have serious form in atmospheric, narrative-heavy tabletop design.
The original Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu was first published by Chaosium in 1991 and won two Origins Awards. Its 19 linked scenarios send investigators on a thousand-mile journey from London to Constantinople aboard the legendary train, hunting fragments of an ancient artefact while cultists and Mythos horrors close in. Rick Swan, writing in Dragon magazine, called it "a start-to-finish knockout, a dazzling and intoxicating campaign with the scope and richness of an epic novel." The RPG is famously deadly, with an expected investigator survival rate of just 30%.
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Set up your group for freeThe board game adaptation seats 1 to 4 players for 90 to 120 minutes of cooperative play. Investigators board the Orient Express as it slips into the Dreamlands, interrogating roughly 20 NPCs, gathering clues and spells, battling supernatural creatures, and rooting out cultists hiding among the passengers before they complete a hideous ritual. A 3D cardboard train serves as the modular play area, giving the game a striking table presence. It ships in six languages: English, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian, and German.
The Kickstarter campaign hit its $50,000 goal in ten minutes back in April 2024, closing at $1.65 million from 13,201 backers. Late pledges on Gamefound pushed the total past $3 million. Backers at the base tier paid $98 for the core game plus the Investigators Unveiled expansion, a considerable saving over the $170 retail price.
For UK backers, Chaosium is shipping from within Great Britain, so no extra customs fees to worry about. If you missed the campaign entirely, keep an eye on your local game shop for retail stock later this year.
Sources: Chaosium Announcement | Kickstarter Campaign | BoardGameGeek | Chaosium Board Games Update
