Recruit a crew of outlaws, gear them up and program their orders, then see if your train heist plan holds together.
The Great Train Robbery hands you $4,000 and a simple goal: rob the gold train that is about to roll through a small Wild West town. The twist is that you never control anyone once the action starts. All your work happens before the train arrives.
You recruit outlaws, outfit them with gear, and write out step-by-step orders for each one. Then you press start and watch your plan play out on a map made of text characters. Sometimes it works perfectly. Often it falls apart in funny ways.
The planning phase
Your first stop is the saloon, where townsfolk are for hire at different prices. Pay attention to their names. A label like “the Sick” means lower health, “Speedy” means faster movement, and “Expensive” simply costs you more. Other traits include tough, cheap and slow.
Next comes the general store. Its shelves hold horses, dynamite, rifles, revolvers, a rocket launcher and a sniper rifle. An outlaw gets one weapon slot and one horse.
At the hotel, you assign each person a starting building plus a task list. A few buildings let people go in and out freely. Others only give access to the roof, which offers extra range and protection from punches, but nobody can climb back down.
When the train rolls in
Shoot one of the wagons until it breaks away from the train. That spills bags of gold onto the ground, along with armed guards ready to fight. Hitting the locomotive slows the whole train down. A running log records each shot, death and getaway live.
Your score is the leftover money plus any gold carried, divided by everyone you hired. Dead gang members still count in that split. If no gold was grabbed, you score nothing.
Common mistakes
- Forgetting a pickup order. If no one has a task to collect the looted gold, the bags just sit there.
- Wrong task order. Each outlaw checks their list from the top and runs the first task that’s possible. Put specific jobs, like attacking guards, above general ones.
- Sending collectors to roofs. A rooftop shooter can never come down to pick up loot.
- Leaving someone unarmed. Bare fists deal 1 damage, while guards fire from 3 tiles away.
- Hiring too many. Every extra hire shrinks each share of the take.
Good to know
The town is built from a random seed shown on the intro screen, and you can press E there to edit it. After a heist, 3 restarts hiring in the same town, and 5 builds a fresh one.
Controls
| Action | Keyboard |
|---|---|
| Continue past the intro / start the game | Enter |
| Edit the random seed on the intro screen | E |
| Open the town map, saloon, store, hotel or start screen | M, O, G, T, K |
| Show the help text | ? |
| Pick a person, item, location or task from a list | Number keys 1 to 0 |
| Hire or fire (saloon), purchase or sell (store) | H / F, P / S |
| Set location, add task, remove task (hotel) | L, A, R |
| Move the selected task up or down the list | Up / Down arrows |
| Go back to the party list | B |
| Confirm or cancel a dialog | Enter / Escape |
| Pause or resume the heist (abort while paused) | Space (then A to abort) |
| After the heist - retry, restart with a new crew, new town | 1, 3, 5 |
The Great Train Robbery FAQ
Can I play The Great Train Robbery on a phone or Chromebook?
A Chromebook or any laptop with a keyboard works fine. Phones and tablets will not work, because every action is a key press and the game has no mouse or touch controls at all.
How long does one heist take?
Planning takes as long as you like, since nothing moves until the train shows up. The robbery itself plays out on its own and ends when your party is gone or nobody has anything left to do.
Is it one player or two?
It is a single-player game. You make every decision for the whole gang, from hiring to task order, and then watch the results unfold without any direct control.
What should I do if the heist keeps failing?
Press 1 after the robbery to retry with the same town, crew and plans. Use Space during the action to pause and read the log, so you can see where things went wrong and change the task order.
