Abstract Games
Kerry Handscomb
Winter 2003
Canada

10 Days in Africa did not seem like much of a game when I first looked at it. After all, the sole purpose of the board is as a map, and all the play of the game happens with the deck of cards, or tiles, showing African countries. Since the cards contain capitol cities and population numbers, I assumed it was a game for the classroom. I should have realized there was more to it because of the usual quality of Alan Moon's games as well as the Out of the Box line in general. (10 Days in Africa, incidentally, is reminiscent of Elfenland, another journey game by Alan Moon.) At the end of one evening four of us, not all avid gamers, we casting around for a game to play that was simple and quick. We gave 10 Days in Africa a try, and everyone one was pleasantly impressed.

The board is a map of Africa, with the countries colored in one of five colors. The deck consists of 60 thick cards, or tiles; 45 of the tiles have countries marked on them; the remaining 15 contain either a neutral colored automobile or an airplane in one of the five colors. The remaining equipment is, for each player, a rack with ten spaces, representing 10 days, into which the tiles can be fitted.

The objective is to get ten tiles arranged in one's rack giving a coherent itinerary for a ten-day journey. The two countries next to each other are connected because one can simply "walk" from one to the other, two countries with one country separating them can be connected via an automobile tile; lastly, any two countries of the same color can be connected by an airplane tile of that color.

The game starts with each player selecting ten tiles randomly and placing them one by one is his rack. Once a card is placed in the rack it cannot be moved. In the second phase of the game the players take turns to draw a tile, replace one of the tiles on their rack with a new tile, and discard the unwanted tile. There are three face-up discard piles and one face-down draw pile. A player can pick a new tile either face down or from one of the three face-up discard piles.

It seems like a very simple game with little interest until you actually play it. Then you realize it has the character of a tricky interactive puzzle. I quickly became apparent that the secret to success is flexibility. In other words, a player who can complete his journey with any one of four cards has an obvious advantage over a player who needs one specific card. One trick, therefore, is to place airplane tiles or automobile tiles in the second or ninth-day positions. Then the first and tenth-day positions may be filled by a variety of choices. In fact, it is probably best to start with solid connections in the middle portion of the journey and work outwards. The necessity to maintain flexibility reminded me of very much of the strategy required in games like Gin Rummy. It seemed like there was little player interaction, but this may be simply because we were not playing the game at a high enough level to make defensive management of the discards necessary.

Ostensibly, the game is for two to four players, although I think that an entertaining solitaire game could be played if you found a good way to handle the three discard piles.

10 Days in Africa is educational, but as one of our group remarked, "It doesn't hit you over the head with it." It's good to have at one's fingertips that fact that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, even if one cannot pronounce it. 10 Days in the USA is already available, and apparently a Middle East version is being planned.

The quality of the equipment, as we have come to expect from Out of the Box is superb. The colors and design are first rate. 10 Days in Africa is a fine, challenging puzzle game.

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