All Aboard!
Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game, designed by Michał Gołąb Gołębiowski (Destinies) and Adam Kwapiński (Nemesis, Frostpunk), is based on the Call of Cthulhu RPG. So yes, this was funded as soon as it launched.
In this cooperative game investigators try to survive on a haunted train. Gather items, talk to passengers, discover clues, learn spells, develop skills and solve the mystery. The game board is a three dimensional cardboard train by the way. A locomotive and six cars that you can move your through with your minis, meeting all kinds of interesting passengers that are represented by dice (their face displaying their current mood). The train moves through an ever-changing landscape, most of it in the Lovecraftian Dreamlands, bringing its own horrors into play.
You can talk to the passengers by pulling tokens out of a bag. Once you draw two with the same icon on it, you’ve gotten an answer, though you can push your luck and try to get more matching icons (at the same time increasing the chance you will fail). The answer may lead to clues: you’ll flip over some tiles, exposing icons or words, and slowly you’ll find out which suspects are indeed cultists, where everyone is going, what their desires are etc. But of course every investigator has way more actions available than just conversation. Then the monsters will activate as well, and an event deck will bring further trouble. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Horror on the Orient Express launched on Kickstarter today and will be available for 17 more days. The pledge includes both the base game and an expansion that adds all available characters as investigators or suspects. It is hinted in the FAQ that other (payed) add-on expansions will be announced during the upcoming daily reveals.
Sorry for the incomplete description of gameplay. I watched part of a video, then got so bored during the interrogating of suspects (let's see if we can draw a token out of the bag that matches this icon... now let's turn over a tile...) that I fast forwarded a few times, then gave up. Too bad. I am the target audience, I've bought or tried most Lovecraft themed games and Nemesis is alright. I will check again later, see if I like it better then.