NightsandWeekends.com
Angela Dalecki
April 2005
USA

10 Days in Africa is a geography game that's fun and strategic as well as educational.

How many games can you think of (that don’t have the words Trivial Pursuit in the title) that are educational as well as fun? Well, 10 Days in Africa is one of those rare games.

The object of 10 Days in Africa is to arrange a make-believe trip across the African continent. At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt ten tiles. Each tile has a country (with a specific color), an automobile (neutral-colored), or a plane (with a specific color) on it. Each player arranges the tiles in his or her tile holder.

Game play proceeds as follows: A player draws a new tile. If he can use it, the new tile replaces one of his old tiles, and the old tile is discarded. If he can’t use it, then the new tile goes into the discard pile, and his turn is over. When a player has arranged his cards in such a way that they chart a course through Africa, that player wins.

Sounds simple enough, right? You’d be surprised. The trick is to arrange your country tiles and transportation tiles just right so that you actually can make that trip. And the game has some pretty strict rules, too. For example: You must start and end with a country tile. Also, you can place two adjacent countries next to each other—as long as a border touches, the game assumes you can cross the border on foot, and you don’t need a car or a plane. You can use an automobile card to travel from country to country as long as there is a third country that borders both. You can use an airplane card to travel to non-adjoining countries—however, the two countries and the plane must all be the same color. And the most important rule is this: Once your tiles are placed, you cannot rearrange them. All you can do is replace an old tile with a new one. Therefore, the real strategy in the game lies in good placement of your tiles before the game even starts.

I had a good time with 10 Days in Africa. It was fun, strategic, and well-themed (the automobile cars look like safari jeeps, and the tile holders are wooden and made to look distinctively African). It’s also a great way to teach older kids about geography—in order to figure out if you can get from one country to another, you need to figure out where those countries are located in relation to each other. The game takes about a half hour to play, and if you know your geography, you don’t even really need the game board (it’s just a map of Africa to help you plan your trip).

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