Age of String

Pieces of string and little wooden cubes. Together at last!

The weekend’s Newcastle Gamers session saw the inaugural play of one of my AireCon bring-and-buy acquisitions: The String Railway Collection. Or, more specifically, the heavier half of Hisashi Hayashi’s string-based train gaming duo: String Railway Cubed.

I’ve played String Railway a few times in the past. It’s a fun — if slightly silly — 30 minute filler which involves players building up a network of railways connecting an assortment of stations… where the railways are represented by pieces of coloured string, the stations are cards placed around the tabletop, and the playing area is… well, as much table space as you manage to contain in a big loop of black string! It’s perhaps not the most rigorous, or super-serious of games (it has a bit of a luck-of-the-draw / last-player-advantage thing going on, and you’ve got to be slightly forgiving of accidental nudges of strings and cards as players make their moves) … but it’s short and fun enough for all of that to not really matter. And definitely worth a play.

String Railway Cubed (which was was previously released under the title String Railway: Transport) is an entirely different beast. Yes, you’re still using pieces of string to connect little cardboard stations together, and you still need to be good natured about nudged and jostled components … but this time around all of the statons are laid out upon the playing surface before you begin (rather than being drawn as you play). And some of them are loaded with resource cubes … which need transporting to matching-coloured depot, via the routes that you lay. Plus, there are contracts to fulfil. And even an engine upgrade mechanism, which determines just how many “links” you can move a cube across each turn.

If this sounds a little bit like a very specific pick-up-and-deliver railway game, usually played on a hex map with tiles, which is very much beloved by heavier gamers… then yes. String Railway Cubed is exactly what you’re thinking: it’s Age of Steam. But with string. 😮

Admittedly the share issuing is gone, the auction is gone, and the income track is gone — so you’re left with a fluffier, less-mathy game where the principle objective is to deliver diverse sets of resource cubes for points — but, nevertheless, a surprising amount of Age of Steam DNA is present in String Railway Cubed.

Which makes this a very interesting string-laying experience!

Our 5 player game ran for just over an hour; the box suggests 15 minutes per player … and the fact that each player only has five pieces of string to place (i.e. five turns to play) over the course the whole game probably hints at the level of thought involved. It’s deceptively thinky!

Despite the comparatively small number of moves, it was a very engaging (and fun!) play … and the game certainly felt like it had a proper arc to it. Deliverable cubes seemed to be in very short supply by the end of the game (perhaps too short supply?) … but I suspect this might’ve had a lot to do with this being our first play, and us all having a reluctance to trade in our early-won cubes for bonus action points … which might’ve fueled engine upgrades… making replenishment cube deployment more worthwhile … and perhaps made the end game strategy very different. In fact, we might’ve only scratched the surface of optimal play on this first outing. Could be some depth here.

In short … I’m surprised by just how well String Railway Cubed pulls off the feel of a “proper” train game, and seems like something that’s properly replayable … rather than a “once-for-the-novelty-factor-and-then-done”. I’m pleased with this. It feels like a good acquisition. (And a fact that the original string railway game is bundled with it — at a cost which is very much at the lower end of current board game pricing — is an added bonus!)

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Just to string this out a bit further…

Given the miraculous achievement of turning Age of Steam into a game played with string …I wondered what some other popular train games might look like if they were re-interpreted through the same medium.

Any guesses?

(I really could’ve used another shade of blue for that last one…)