Whistle Stop

EvEvanstar2,5

In this game, players start their trains on one end of the board. On your turn, you can take up to four actions, by spending a coal or whistle token to move your train and resolve the action on the spot you land in. These action spots will mostly either collect you a cube of a specific color, allow you to spend sets of specific cubes for points and a stock marker. There are a few other special tiles you might find, but they're the exception. The movement trick is that the trains can't move backwards in the tile columns without a special effect. This means that as you progress, your options are more limited. To a certain extent this is fine, because there are big rewards for getting your train to the far side of the map. Budgeting your actions can be tricky, as even though you can resolve four actions, you only get the action tokens to resolve two actions during the income phase each round. This pushes you to try and find extra action tokens through special effects on the board to keep your engine running so to speak. The game ends one of two ways, either when one player has gotten all their trains to the far side of the board, or when the round timer runs out. At the end of the game, players score extra points for stocks they have the majority of, with ties broken by who bought the stock first. This feels a little strange, since if I'm the first to get a color of stock, it takes a single player twice as much work to beat me for it, when I'm also getting the advantage of being ahead in traveling to the far side of the board, but possibly this is a forking strategy, where one player might focus on getting as far along as they can, and another might work on staying back and collecting stocks? It also felt a little odd for there to be a substantial VP bonus for majority stockholder, but nothing for even 2nd place in each stock. Overall the tight game timer makes the game a faster play than steam, but for some reason it doesn't feel as satisfying. The AP is still quite high. Cubes, despite being theoretically unlimited, as you get one from the supply any time you stop on a space, feel like they are in short supply. The rails on the hex tiles have so many paths, and you have several trains, that it can feel hopeless to figure out what your best move at any given time is. Moves usually feel more or less equitable, although that could be lack of experience on my part. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ☆ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment