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.
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 both players build a communal train to deliver cargo among ten location cards. The locomotive starts between two rows of locations, and players play cards behind it to elongate the train in both directions, a shared structure you’re each trying to bend to your own advantage.
On your turn, you take up to two actions: play cards, claim locations, or push the train forward one space. Claiming a location requires a specific type of card, and locations can hold either one or two train cards, depending on their size. Some claims also trigger additional free actions as a reward, which can create satisfying little chain reactions when the timing lines up.
The game ends when a player runs out of cards or all locations have been claimed. Scoring is conditional, so the puzzle isn’t just about claiming territory. It’s about claiming the right territory with the right cards. Whoever accumulates the most points wins.
The Freightmaster’s Logbook also includes 10 additional campaign-style games that modularly change the system with new challenges and twists. Complete a chapter, and you can fold its new mechanics into the base game going forward, a clever design choice that lets the game evolve alongside your familiarity with it.
Logbook of Discovery
Whistlewood Express is a solid journey on the rails. Each play clocks in around 15–20 minutes, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it offers enough friction to make you want to reset and go again. It unfolds as a timing-and-positioning puzzle: you’re trying to get the right card into the right location at the right moment, while your opponent manipulates the same shared board state. That tension, both players pulling the same train in different directions, is where the game finds its personality.
It also rewards offensive play. Train cards that end up without a home can be worth negative points at the end of the game, a nice twist that gives trailing players a meaningful way to slow down a runaway leader. There’s also a solo automa with multiple difficulty settings that provides a genuinely solid one-player experience.
The base gameplay alone, while clean and mechanically distinctive, doesn’t vary dramatically from game to game. The decision space is real, but the canvas is small.
That’s precisely where the Freightmaster’s Logbook shines. Working through it enhances the base system with new objectives and obstacles that meaningfully change how the game is played each session, whether it’s weather effects, treacherous mountain goats, or a draw bag of nature tokens. There’s something genuinely new to discover with each chapter.
I won’t spoil what else is tucked inside, but the modular challenges consistently end up being more fun than the standard rules alone. It feels entirely intentional: the base game teaches you the ropes, then the logbook provides the personality. Once you’ve played a chapter, you keep those mechanics in your default game going forward. By the end, you’ll have developed favorites, and the experience becomes a customized version of Whistlewood Express that’s uniquely yours.
And because you’re likely playing repeatedly with the same person, it becomes a lovely curated game—almost like a shared house variant built through discovery.
One drawback: the iconography can be a little hard to parse at first, and many cards look similar at a glance. It only took a round or two to fully internalize the symbology, though, and it stopped being an issue entirely by the second play.
Whistlewood Express is a quick, clever two-player puzzle dressed in charming railway clothes. The base game lays the track, but the Freightmaster’s Logbook is what makes the journey memorable, layering in surprises that transform a simple, elegant system into something you’ll tailor specifically to your table. If you’ve got a regular gaming partner and you enjoy discovering a game together over repeated plays, this one’s absolutely worth punching your ticket.
Whistlewood Express arrives on Gamefound in March 2026.
