The Great Train Robbery is a planning game set in a tiny frontier town, drawn entirely with text characters. A train packed with gold is headed your way, and you have $4,000 to put together a crew that can rob it. When you play The Great Train Robbery unblocked, the twist hits fast: once the action starts, you control no one. Every choice is made ahead of time, and then you watch your scheme work or fall apart.
The Goal and the Catch
The author built it in a week for a roguelike challenge, and the manual openly calls it strange and not user-friendly. That’s part of the charm. There is no hero to steer, no aiming and no reflex test. You hire, you shop, you write orders, and then you press start and hope.
Each command is a single key, and the available keys are always marked on screen. Press ? for the help text at any point. M, O, G, T and K jump between the town map, the saloon, the store, the hotel and the start screen.
Hiring Your Crew at the Saloon
Press O for the saloon. Ten townsfolk are up for hire, and the base fee is $400 each. You pick a person with a number key, then H to hire or F to fire. Firing is free, so you can rethink your gang as often as you like.
About four in ten recruits come with a trait, and their nickname tells you which one:
- Healthy, Big or Tough adds 3 health to the usual 5.
- Weak or “the Sick” takes 2 health away.
- Cheap knocks $100 off the fee, and Expensive adds $100.
- Speedy or “the Lightning” acts twice as fast, while Slow or “the Snail” takes twice as long.
Gear From the General Store
Press G for the store. Each outlaw can carry one weapon and one horse, and selling an item back is free. The shelf holds just one of each item, so only one outlaw can have the sniper rifle.
| Item | Price | Damage | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revolver | $100 | 3 | 3 |
| Rifle | $300 | 4 | 5 |
| Sniper rifle | $500 | 5 | 8 |
| Rocket launcher | $1,000 | 5 | 10, with a blast |
| Dynamite | $800 | 20 | placed on the track |
Bigger guns are slower to use, so a revolver fires far more often than a rocket launcher. Horses cost $200, or $300 for a super-fast one, and make a rider move quicker.
How to Play The Great Train Robbery: Writing the Plan
Press T for the hotel. This is where heists are won. Every outlaw needs a starting spot (L) and a list of tasks (A to add, R to remove, Up and Down arrows to reorder).
There are two kinds of starting spots. Walk-through buildings have doors and windows, so people can come and go. Roofs give longer range and keep brawlers away, but whoever starts there can never come down.
The tasks you can give are attack the locomotive, attack wagons with gold, attack train guards, collect gold, escape once there’s nothing left to collect, move toward the town center, move toward the locomotive, and place dynamite on the track. Whenever an outlaw has to decide, they take the first task on the list that can be done right now. There is no other brain, so if you don’t write a behavior down, it won’t happen.
When the Train Rolls In
Press Enter from the start screen and the train arrives. Your crew fires on a wagon until it breaks loose, and out tumble the sacks of gold. That’s also when armed guards jump out and start shooting. Hitting the locomotive slows the whole train down, which buys your shooters more time.
A log lists every shot, death and getaway. Space pauses so you can read it, and A while paused aborts the run. The heist ends when your crew is wiped out or nobody has anything left to do.
Your score is your unspent cash plus the gold your crew holds, divided by everyone you hired, dead or alive. No gold, or no survivors, means zero.
Planning Mistakes to Avoid
- Vague orders on top. Put “attack train guards” ahead of “attack wagons” so new guards get handled first.
- No one gathering gold. Without a collect order, the sacks stay put and your score is zero.
- Your only collector on a roof. Rooftop shooters are stuck there, so team them up with somebody at street level.
- Empty hands. An unarmed outlaw can only punch for 1 damage, and guards fire from 3 tiles out.
- Too big a gang. The total is split across everyone, so each extra recruit has to earn their share.
- Spending every dollar. Unspent cash counts toward the score, so a cheap plan that works can beat a pricey one.
Try Again, Then Try Something Similar
The fun is in tweaking. After the dust settles, press 1 to replay and fix your task order, 3 to recruit again in the same town, or 5 for a fresh town. Each town grows from a random seed, which you can edit with E on the intro screen to share a layout with a friend.
It needs a keyboard and some patience, so it suits a longer free period more than a 2-minute break. For more slow-burn games, see the adventure games or try Warden’s Duty, a turn-based prison crawl, or A Dark Room, a text game that grows from one fire into a whole village.
