Train (board game)

Train is a 2009 board game designed by Brenda Romero built around a Holocaust theme, part of her self-described The Mechanic is the Message series that uses a game's own rules, rather than its artwork or text, to carry an emotional message. On its surface the game presents an ordinary railway competition: players move yellow pegs representing passengers along tracks toward stations using dice rolls and a hand of strategy cards, appearing to race for efficiency the way many transport-themed board games do. The game withholds its true subject until late in play, when participants discover that the final station each train is heading toward is a Nazi concentration camp, and that their moves have been transporting people to their deaths throughout the game. Romero designed Train deliberately to make players feel some of the emotional weight of participating, even unknowingly, in historical atrocity, aiming the experience particularly at helping people grasp what abstract history lessons about the Holocaust can leave distant or unfelt.