Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Everything was lining up just right for my first play of The String Railway Collection. I shared with the Meeple Mountain team that I had picked up the game at Gen Con 2025, and one colleague was excited to hear what I thought because he had a good experience with the 2009 original. The original game, The String Railway, was designed by Hisashi Hayashi, the designer of one of my all-time faves, Yokohama. The new collection of games was published by CrowD Games, which has produced two very different five-star games in my collection: Bestiary of Sigillum and En Route.
I busted out the new collection on a recent game night; the new collection includes two games, String Railway and String Railway: Cubed. I started with the base game, then did a play of the Cubed variant.
To say that The String Railway Collection was a roller coaster would be an understatement. However, there is only one title in the box worth playing.
String Railway: Don’t
Two gaming friends came over for a game night recently and saw the box for The String Railway Collection on my downstairs bar. These are players who have been in “The Hobby” (although not “The Hobby”) for 30+ years.
“Oh, The String Railway,” one of them lamented. He has a distant look in his eyes, as if replaying the 2009 original in his mind.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. ”It’s just, it’s not very good.”
I later broke out String Railway—based on the 2009 original—with a group of three players and learned how right that hobby friend was, because we collectively thought the base game was terrible.
Here’s the main hook with both games included in The String Railway Collection: the string. As a train gamer, I’ll play anything that is even vaguely train game-adjacent, and String Railway fits the bill. A simple black border forms the play area, which is just a big string you can drape around the play area on your table (think Crash Octopus, but bigger). There’s a river in the form of a blue string. A mountain represented by a green string.
Over the course of five rounds, players will drop one piece of their own string to connect stations and score points based on their routes. Things get interesting as the play area fills up—there’s string everywhere. However, this game’s main issue is the “draw and place a station” step. That’s because each player randomly draws a station, then connect it to other stations. Many of these score minimal points, feature bland powers (even using the word “powers” feels off), and don’t require a player to really use their brain at all.
In this way, String Railway is more family-friendly than String Railway: Cubed…but turns are so boring that I can’t recommend it at all. String Railway wasn’t just stripped down, it was almost completely devoid of any interesting decisions. In a strange way, five turns sounded too short, but in practice, five turns felt one or two turns too long.
Given the strategic depth on display in Yokohama, I was shocked that String Railway was designed by the same person. If String Railway was the only game in the box, I would have likely given this my lowest rating for a game in 2025.
Luckily, the second game in the box saved this puppy’s bacon.
String Railway: Do
String Railway: Cubed is essentially “Age of String.” Or maybe “Age of Shoelace”, as one player joked during a five-player game of String Railway: Cubed.
String Railway: Cubed uses much of the same system as is present in the base game, but uses an action point system tied to upgradable engine cards and a goods delivery model that appears to be ripped directly from spiritual cousins like Age of Steam and Railways of the World.
In String Railway: Cubed players have to complete contracts and move cubes to matching-colored stations to score points. There is so much more improvisation on display over the base game, in part because the game’s map is set up before the game, as opposed to being built during the game through random cardplay. Moving cubes requires a fun amount of creativity, scores can remain close, and one really gets a sense that the best planner will consistently win.
The challenges presented by the tight playspace are a blast in both formats, but more so in String Railway: Cubed. With five players (the full player count), the final map is a mess, but within that chaos everyone can find ways to score. Contracts offer a handsome risk/reward: if the game ends before a player can complete a contract, the owner will lose two points, in a game where winners might end up with 30-50 points. Completed contracts score five points, but also offer their owner a wild purple cube that can be used for set collection scoring at the end of the game.
In either variant, each player has five strings to place, one for each of their five turns, one round at a time. Four of those strings are the same length, while the fifth string is about 50% longer than the other short strings. Sussing out when to use the long string was—and I still can’t figure out why—much, much more interesting in the Cubed variant. Some players used their long string to connect a wild number of stations, all in an effort to set up their own network that could funnel cubes from place to place.
One guy who joined me for the play of String Railway (the base game) also joined me for Cubed. First, big ups to him for coming back because when he saw we might be playing String Railway again, he groaned loudly. That he could overcome that, and still enjoy himself playing Cubed was a great barometer of how we both felt about the variant.
String Railway: Cubed is the only game of the two worth playing, at least with other gamers. You might trick me into doing the base game with my kids, to pass the time, but I won’t be happy about it.
Truly, A Tale of Two Cities
Maybe it is my love affair with train games, but I really enjoyed my play of String Railway: Cubed, and it is for this reason I recommend the overall package. Age of Steam fans looking for a lighter, shorter change-up where they can move cubes around for points will feel right at home here, although in a strange twist, the thinky nature and limited turns still mean that String Railway: Cubed is going to take an hour with five players.
Some pictures I took at the end of my play of String Railway: Cubed really nailed how much fun it was to build out a route system with so much other traffic in the way. It’s fun to lay track in this game because the rules dictate a player has to pay action points to cross any strings not on a station card on the game’s grid. Snaking each string track around and through the right areas of the grid is very satisfying, and getting the right cubes to complete sets ends up being the game. Deciding when to upgrade an engine to get more action points is a critical choice, thanks to the limited number of rounds.
String Railway: Cubed is absolutely worth a look. The base game, String Railway, is not. However, the games are packaged together, so you’re not going to have a choice when it comes to a buying decision. I still think the newer game is worth it, and the whole thing comes in a box that will fit in your backpack.
