Part board game, part roguelike, all trains going boom
As kids, one of our favorite things to do was to take toy cars and bash them together. I’ve chipped countless Hot Wheels as they ran into each other on ramps. We’re drawn to things hitting each other, mechanical things, and can’t look away. This is proportional, as the bigger the object and the more boom then the bigger sadistic enjoyment we get. Trains, of course, were always the best things to see crash on a TV screen. The old black and white movies we watched on local access TV on Saturday afternoons used toy trains and a lot of slow motion to make the crashes look wicked, and we were mesmerized. I guess that’s why my parents never bought us toy trains, because they probably knew that we we destroy the expensive things fairly quickly, but we never stopped longing.
Cut to some 40 years later and Battle Train is released, taking that idea digitally and turning a real video game out of it in some fun and interesting ways. The project from developer Terrible Posture Games is designed like a board game where players take turns planning and growing a train track on a play field, collecting items and resources, opening and closing gates, and avoiding obstacles — all in anticipation of launching the train at the right time to take out the enemy’s side.
And hey, it’s a lot of fun! There’s a glut of roguelikes right now, especially of card-based variants, but this is the first one where we’re controlling trains to use as massive weapons. Now, before I relay this as some terrifying concept it must be understood that the premise is actually wrapped in a cartoon-style game show at home more within Looney Tunes than Death Race. It’s lite on actual harm and more imbued with the sort of destruction one would find in Minesweeper. We build up our track by collecting pieces and hope to ram our train enough times into the goal to defeat our opponent. The presentation is lighthearted, with a definitive mustachioed “bad guy” that sits at the top of the game show heap that we’re trying to beat. Win and we get the notoriety.
The roguelike path is there, where we need to defeat boards and collect cards, buy cards, upgrade our train and move on. The initial battles are easy, but there can be a bit of a brutal spike in difficulty that can end us rather quickly early in our adventure.
A couple of technical issues kept breaking the game on the Switch, as I’d get to a point where it was my enemy’s turn and they wouldn’t do anything. They just sat there. Save, exit, restart, nothing. No movement. This sucks as I’d be in a great run when it happens, and then I’d have that hard stop and need to start all the way over. But that bug is squashed now, as I haven’t hit it in the last 10 or so runs I’ve been on. In the meantime I would play the leaderboard-based games (there are a lot of things to do in the game, all things considered) and managed to sit at the top a couple of times. My reign of train terror is over now, unfortunately. I’ve been bested.
Battle Train is a surprisingly fresh, easy to handle game in the card-based roguelike genre. Apart from some early technical issues that seem to have been ironed out, it’s a solid and enjoyable experience that is worthy of dipping into for something new.
This review is based on a Switch code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It was played on the Nintendo Switch and the Nintendo Switch 2. This video originally appeared in The SideQuest LIVE for July 31, 2025.
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