Lucardo: Derailed

Lucardo Manchester’s newest game is of course a train game, but more than that it’s a game of two halves, to the point where it could almost be two separate 30 minute games that share a common theme.

The story is that you’re trying to solve a murder mystery – but on behalf of a criminal, pretending to be detectives, needing to solve it before the real detectives turn up. As criminals, you’re also going to swipe everything valuable that is t nailed down, and in the first half that’s what you’re doing. You have a station waiting area that contains a plethora of valuables, each locked away and reachable by solving a puzzle; you can tackle them in pretty much any order, and the challenge is to fill your loot bag as much as possible. Getting everything is a challenge but is not out of the question; with two of us we missed only a couple of items, due to observation fails.

In the second part you’re on the train, and need to solve your way through to finding the culprit. You need to start this second half at the halfway point of the game, regardless of how many valuables you still have to collect. From a player satisfaction point of view I’d have put the order the other way round: solve the more linear mystery section first, then do the frantic collect-all-you-can with whatever time is remaining. As it is, you might find you’re cut off earlier than you’d like in part one, but finish with some spare time in part two. Narratively it’s reasonable enough though.

The attractive set dressing looks good and works well as a backdrop to a game that’s primarily about solving as much as you can. In the collection stage it’s made very clear what is and isn’t a target, avoiding confusion. And the puzzles are broadly very fair, though given the number of them it’s likely there’ll be at least one or two that trip you up.

As normal for collection style games, unless you’re extremely fast you’ll need to make your peace with not solving everything in the room. If that’s not off-putting then this is a satisfying puzzle challenge; though it’s perhaps best to think of it as a double bill of two shorter games as much as a single hour-long room.