Portugues
The Great Train Robbery
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About the game
A gang wants to rob a train, and you are the one who plans it. The Great Train Robbery turns the usual roguelike on its head: you never control a hero. You prepare the heist, and when the action starts you can only watch, pause and reset.
The planning is where everything happens. In the Saloon you hire people from the town, and their names hint at their strengths and weaknesses. In the General Store you buy equipment, with a limit of one weapon and one horse per person. The plan is made in the Hotel: you give each member a starting location (a walk-through building, or a roof, which gives better range and safety from close attacks but cannot be left) and a list of tasks. And the tasks are the heart of it: your crew has no brain of its own, so every behaviour has to be spelled out and put in the right order. A member always does the first task on the list that can be done, so a crew told to run away first and shoot second will never shoot.
The train is fast and carries gold. You need to damage it enough to uncouple a wagon so that the gold is accessible, or shoot the locomotive to slow the train down, and you have to give somebody the task of collecting the loot or it will lie there. Once the gold is out, the guards appear and start shooting back. Then the heist is over, the score is added up and you can retry with the same town and crew, or start anew.
It looks like a terminal screen: letters on a brown background, a map of the town with the bank, the sheriff and the saloon, and a keyboard hint on every option.
Playing it here
Click Play. Press Enter on the intro screens; there you can type a seed number to replay a particular town (press E to edit it). The ? key shows the in-game help at any moment. The mouse is not used; everything is done by the keys that are underlined in the interface. The game is not saved, but a seed always gives you the same town.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| M, O, G, T, K | open the map, the saloon, the general store, the hotel, or start the heist |
| ? | show the help |
| 0-9 | pick a person, item or task from a list |
| H | hire the person you picked |
| Enter | confirm |
| Space | pause the heist |
A few things worth knowing
Order your tasks carefully. The first task that can be done wins, so put the most urgent ones first.
Do not forget the loot. If nobody has the "collect gold" task, the gold stays on the ground.
Use the map first. Looking at the town before choosing where each person starts is worth the minute it takes.
Credits and licence
The Great Train Robbery was made by Ondřej Žára for the 2026 7-Day Roguelike Challenge and is released under the MIT licence. It uses his FACE and rl-display libraries and the Cascadia Mono font (SIL Open Font License 1.1). The title-screen ASCII art of the original was removed in this version, because the author credits it to a third party. The licence texts are linked from this page.