Dice2Mice
Tony Hetherington
February 2005
United Kingdom

Imagine that you have just 10 days to explore all of Africa. That’s the challenge that player’s of this family game from Out of the Box Publishing face. Designed by Alan Moon, to many gamers a sure sign of quality, the aim of the game is to plot a 10 day route through Africa that conforms to the winning conditions that define the game. The tour must start and end in a country (rather than a mode of transport) and the other days must form a continuous link including transport.

While you can journey from one adjacent country to another on foot, cars and planes offer more options. Placing a car in your route allows you to link to a country by driving through another whereas a plane allows the freedom to jump to any other country that is marked on the board in that colour – as long as they match the colour of the plane.

As the game begins each player fills their wooden racks by taking a tile, examining it and then placing it. The catch is that once a tile has been placed it can’t be swapped so while you have some influence over your starting position there’s still much to do to plot t…hat route.

Preparation is completed by turning over three cards to form three discard piles. In a turn a player can either choose the top card from the pack or the top card from any of the discard piles and swap it for a tile in their rack, discarding the displaced card on the discard pile of their choice.

There’s some player interaction as you can cover up a tile with your discard if you think the next player is waiting for it but mostly you’re concentrating on trying to complete your own route.

10 Days in America transports the tour to the United States with the same game mechanics and I suspect there maybe a lot more in the series as this is a highly transportable game. Can I be the first to invent 10 days in Europe, 10 days in Asia, or 10 days in Australia? Or for sports fans a tour of NFL cities or Premier League grounds? While I wait for the royalty cheques to come rolling in I’ll keep practicing 10 Days in Africa.

You’ll have to play several games of this before you truly appreciate it as it does suffer from the minor fault that some key decisions are made right at the beginning of the game. This is tough on beginners so try a demo game with all tiles showing until everyone’s happy with how the game works.

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