All Aboard!

Trains are a core pillar of the board gaming world. It'd be hard to find a gamer who hasn't played a train game of some sort, whether that's the gateway-friendly Ticket to Ride, a crunchy 18XX title, or the industrial majesty of Brass: Birmingham. It's one of the hobby's most enduring themes, equally at home in the classic era and the modern renaissance. Something about locomotives just clicks with gamers: the routes, the networks, the satisfying logic of getting from here to there.

Most train games revolve around route building, delivering cargo, or some variation of the two. The formula is well-worn, and for good reason. It works. But it's rare to see a "train" game genuinely spin the genre into something truly different. Usually, the chrome changes; the bones stay the same.

Enter Whistlewood Express, a two-player game that uses only cards and a single, handsome wooden locomotive. To my surprise, it plays more like hand management than a traditional train game, and it comes with a mysterious spiral notebook tucked in the box: the Freightmaster's Logbook. That notebook turns out to be more important than it first appears.

2P Train

The base game is played over a series of turns in which…

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I’m a big fan of Friedemann Friese.

From my very first play of Power Grid back in 2016, I knew there was just something about his games that were different from other designers. And so by the time Free Ride came out in the US, in 2022, I had already acquired many of his titles (Faiyum, Feierabend, Power Grid, Copycat, etc.). My team member Tom Franklin reviewed Free Ride last year, and now I’d like to follow up with my review of Free Ride USA.

🎶 “Come on and take a free ride”. ♬

[caption id="attachment_327807" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yes the name of the game is Free Ride (Freie Fahrt) in German. What can I say. I got this when I was at Essen Spiel.[/caption]

“We gotta do better, it's time to begin” - Free Ride USA overview

Free Ride USA, like its sibling, is a “train game”, although 18XX players might take exception to that label. Players take turns performing two main actions: laying track and moving their engine across the country. As they progress from city to city, they may optionally pick up a route pair from the public display. This isn’t an “action” per se, but something they can do as part of moving their train…

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