Various murders on The Orient Express.

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express remains her signature work. It features her most popular and most-used detective, the delightfully pompous Hercule Poirot; it is populated by a cast of unusual characters; its resolution is among her most complex and most difficult to foresee; and its setting captures the romance of European train travel while providing a perfectly closed system for Poirot’s investigation. The book’s structure is more regimented than a typical Christie mystery; rather than proceeding as a novel might, Murder on the Orient Express is mostly broken up by the stages of a planned investigation, with one chapter in the middle section devoted to each of the interviews with the suspects. That said, Christie was such a master of the language that the prose flies, and she even winks at the reader and tweaks M. Poirot with the discovery of the scarlet kimono.

Reading the book – which really needs little in the way of review anyway (if you like Christie’s books, you’ve either read this one or intend to do so) – reminded me of one of my favorite board games, a hidden gem from the late 1980s known simply as Orient Express. The game is long out of print, although it appears that at least one of the designers is trying to keep its memory alive through a new Website for the game. Orient Express takes the standard logic grid puzzles (here’s one example)familiar to law students studying for their LSATs and to buyers of puzzle magazines and turns them into a multi-player board game. There’s been a murder on the Orient Express and each player must try to solve the crime by searching berths, talking to suspects and crew members, and by sending telegrams regarding the suspects, all before the train completes its journey from Paris to Istanbul. The game itself requires that players follow trails of clues – often one crew member will suggest that the player talk to someone else or search a specific room – but some clues are simply red herrings, while others give information that might lead indirectly to the solution (e.g., the weapon used) without specifically pointing to a suspect or a motive. Players may also use “secrecy tokens” to make it more difficult for other players to interrogate a suspect or crew member or to search a room, as if the suspect/crew member had been bribed, and on certain die rolls a player may mess with one of his rivals by, say, moving him to a distant spot on the train. If the train reaches Istanbul before anyone has solved the case, every player remaining in the game must guess the solution; I’ve only had this happen once, and it requires a lot of high rolls on the die for it to come to pass.

The cases are very well designed; they’re all solvable and they’re all clear, with some occasional bits of humor (especially the victim’s names, which are always terrible puns) thrown into clues. The play itself is very simple – roll the die, move, interrogate someone or search a room, and occasionally move the train and, when it crosses a border, roll the die again for a somewhat random event to shake things up. If you already know how to fill out a grid for a logic puzzle, you can play this game with just a quick read of the instructions to get the board setup right. It’s a great thinking game that’s still fun because of the way the competition against the other detectives plays out.

The original game came with ten cases, each of which may only be played once, but there are at least three supplements of ten cases apiece available now. You can find used versions of the game online, at BoardGameGeek and occasionally on eBay, although I hold out hope that we’ll see a new version in print someday.