The Art of Boardgames

Since dipping deeper into the art of games recently, I’ve discovered a wealth of games – card games in particular – produced by the company Pepys in the UK during the middle of the 20th century.  I’ve been playing games all my life, more deeply in the hobby for about 20 years, but only become aware of some of these gems in the past few months.  And there are plenty more to come…

This post features another classic from the Pepys collection, Express, in which players form sets of train cards and progress them through a station.  According to the entry on boardgamegeek.com, it appears there are two editions published of this game.

A look at the artwork on my set, including the neat, fold-out station cards (see first pic, top left), indicates that mine is the first edition, published in 1947.  A glimpse at some of the artwork from the second edition (circa 1955), shows that this appears to be even richer than the first.
Sadly, although I haven’t played the game myself, a glance over the rules indicates that is little more than set collecting, a-la Happy Families, etc., with the extra novelty of having to play signal cards to advance your train through the station.

Again, the artwork is uncredited (and so is the game designer), which is a pity.  The clickable pictures here reveal most of the cards artwork in the game in low-mid resolution. Both editions of the game looked to be inspired by a real train-spotting spirit and I imagine there would be a lot of British train fans that would have a copy of this game in their train memorabilia collection.