Brought to you by the fine people at Cyanide and Happiness and the other fine people at Skybound Games comes a fun new game about tough decisions, careful strategy... and trolley murder. Seriously, a lot of trolley murder... more than any other game on the market, in fact. By a lot. Trial By Trolley is a game with a simple premise and increasingly outlandish gameplay that involves players desperately try to save their track from being run over by a crazy runaway trolley... all while sabotaging their opponent's track to make it a more tempting target.
After everyone on each team has built their track with innocent, guilty and modifier cards the conductor listens to their arguments for which track should be spared. Afterwards, they send the trolley down one of the two tracks, killing everything on it and earning the losing team death tokens. After everyone on each team has had a turn as conductor the players tally up the number of death tokens with the winner being whoever has the fewest once the game is over.
The game was first funded on Kickstarter in 2019 and began shipping out to its backers in late January 2020.
This game includes examples of the following tropes:
- Asshole Victim: Guilty cards are typically things players would want to hit and are played on the opponent's track to make it a more appealing target for the conductor. Common examples include famous dictators, rude douchebags, bigots, criminals, trolls and bands the creators don't like.
- Black Comedy: Comes with being a Cyanide and Happiness game. The main goal requires players to convince the trolley conductor to murder the rival team's track by using "innocent" and "guilty" cards depicting everything from young children to ruthless criminals stumbling onto the tracks. Afterwards the players have to come up with a good reason why their track should be spared while the other track gets turned into chunky salsa.
- Car Fu: Well, trolley fu technically. Everything in the game can be killed by a trolley, even things like demons and monsters.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The conductor can choose to kill Satan, God, Cthulhu and several other similarly powerful beings simply by running them over with their trolley.
- Genie in a Bottle: One of the innocent cards is a magical genie that will grant the conductor three wishes, but only if they don't hit it with the trolley.
- Hellgate: One of the guilty cards is a portal to hell that can only be closed by a runaway trolley.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: One of the innocent cards is a young child who survived cancer.
- Mad Scientist: Some of the guilty cards.
- Monster Clown: One of the guilty cards, naturally.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Some of the guilty cards feature real world hate groups and bigots.
- Sadistic Choice: Used in a comically over the top way. Do you run over the track with Bob Ross, young children playing and Robo Hitler? Or do you instead go after the track with a three legged dog, a deadly virus container and the portal to hell?
- Take That!: Some of the "guilty" cards are clear shots at people or things that the creators dislike.
- Putin, who is riding on a bear and walking a certain orange politician on a leash.
- Nickelback, who are even featured on the cover art of the derailed edition.
- George Lucas, right at the exact moment he thinks up Jar Jar Binks.
- Ross Geller is apparently bad enough to be included in this category.
- Timeshare salesmans with enticing offers.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Everything in the game can be killed by a simple runaway trolley, including monsters, robots, superheroes and other things that should be immune to such things.
