Our tabletop group has played a large number of train related games recently. From Maglev Metro to Ticket to Ride, there are just a lot of different train games out there. Whistle Stop is the newest train game to our tabletop group; it has everyone racing across the board, building tracks, gaining resources, collecting shares, and hopefully banking a lot of points.
Whistle Stop is a pretty detailed strategy game where the board, at first, only has end tiles, a middle row of tiles, and a starting row of tiles. Each player gets three tiles in their hand, so that they can start building out their track. Everyone also gets a player card, a set amount of coal or whistles depending on when they are taking their turn or the coal available for that round, and little train meeples. A counter for each player also is placed around the outside of the board, which keeps score.
The wooden trains are so cute! When setting up Whistle Stop, everything does come together well, like a puzzle, with you putting the outside out first and then filling in the middle, although it was hard to stack up the various tiny piles of coal for the rounds and fit the tiles in properly. It felt like there could have been some sort of included pockets for the coals for each day, but I digress.
When it comes to your turn, you have a lot of options. You can take up to four actions for your turn, as well as do some things that don’t count as actions at all. Using your coal, you can move forward one stop. Stops can look like circles with resources on them, or special tiles that are on the board. Some special tiles give you more items; resources, coal, whistles, while others give you the option to trade something you have for specific items. Other special tiles require specific resources, in exchange for points you instantly get to bank and a share of that company, which is important later. It is also important to note that you cannot go backwards in a row using coal, only forward or vertically through the row you are in.
If you have a whistle, you can actually go backwards and can take two moves for that one action, making whistles really powerful within the game. You can also, not costing an action, purchase train upgrades with resources that snap onto your character tile. There is just a lot to consider in each and every move you make. If you are moving into a bit of the board that hasn’t been created yet, you even get to decide which tile you place there, and how.
Racing across the board, you will be collecting loads of resources and trying to make it to the end. The last row on the board of Whistle Stop has a lot of different, high reward goals, that allow you to trade more resources for large amounts of points but do not give you shares. Once your train makes it to this end area, you actually then have to park it on the side of the board out of play for the rest of the game, but do get to bank a few items that are in your parking space.
The end of Whistle Stop happens either when all of the days, as displayed by coal circles on the side of the board, have passed or if one player gets all of their trains to the end zone. We played through all of the days, which did take quite some time with our group, as there is really just a lot to consider. One strategy, which happened a lot in our playthroughs, had players blocking others on the track, as a coal does not allow you to move through other trains on basic stops. This meant that some players were stuck waiting on a resource tile for them to move, or for a spare whistle to leap past them. Stopping at specific stops without all of the resources needed to complete it can actually cause you to lose points, so you may want to hold off for that reason. If you ever skip a turn completely, for whatever reason, you can get a whistle to use for the next turn, but I didn’t see much point in skipping an entire turn myself.
Even if you are ahead in Whistle Stop, the end of the game will see a lot of points being put out for each person. Players will get points if they have the most shares in a company (or if there is a tie, have the lowest number share), if they have extra coal or whistles, extra resources (depending on rarity), might lose points if they had rare tiles, and probably more. It becomes a moment of just sorting it out and seeing where all of the players land. With that said, you cannot really tell who is going to win until the last moment, which is always a tense and challenging battle.
Whistle Stop is an interesting game that has a lot of complexities, perfect for a group who likes deeper strategy games! Our group did enjoy our time with this game, and once you get going, turns do get quicker and there becomes a really good flow to everything. And, if you like trains, that’s a plus too!
You can find Whistle Stop on Amazon.
Love board games? Check out our list of the top board games we’ve reviewed.
