Out of the Box<\/a>. We played it last night during Family Game Night — and had a lot of fun.<\/p>\nThe game is conceptually simple. Put together (sort of like putting together hands of rummy) a trip through Africa over the course of ten days. You do this with individual country cards (most African countries are represented) placed in your 10-day tray. The countries can be adjacent to each other (walking between bordering countries), with a car card in between (driving between countries that have one country in-between them), or with an airplane card of the same color as the starting and ending countries (flying between countries).<\/p>\n
That’s pretty much it. Each turn you can draw a card from the deck, or from one of the three discard piles. Replace one card in your tray, and discard. When you’ve created a contiguous journey over your ten days, you win.<\/p>\n
While the mechanics are simple, the play is challenging. Not only do you get a crash course on where African nations are and who they border (which is a good thing), but you have to do some strategic planning, keep track of what’s already been discarded, and be willing to abandon a half-planned segment if something better comes along. Luck, in the form of what gets drawn, plays a large enough part to be an equalizer, but strategy also plays a role in terms of how you initially arrange your tray (once set, you can’t move cards around), how you piece together your journey, and how you discard (potentially blocking discards that someone else might need, as well as taking the risk to discard and pick it back up next time as a way to “move” cards). You can brute-force a journey plan, slowly, from beginning to end, but you need to be ready to take calculated risks if the right discards come up.<\/p>\n
The game is rated age 10+, but Katherine at 9 did just fine (and actually won one of the two games) while we two adults also felt challenged. After the first “learning” game, the second game took us a bit over the predicted 20-30 minutes.<\/p>\n
The game also comes in US, Europe, and Asia editions. <\/p>\n
An enjoyable game for 2-4, we will definitely be keeping it in rotation for Family Game Night. Thanks, Mary!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mary gave Katherine a copy of this game, from Out of the Box. We played it last night during Family Game Night — and had a lot of fun. The game is conceptually simple. Put together (sort of like putting together hands of rummy) a trip through Africa over the course of ten days. You … Continue reading “Game review: 10 Days in Africa<\/i>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6788,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/02\/probe.html","url_meta":{"origin":15222,"position":0},"title":"Probe","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 2-Jan-05 8:59am","format":false,"excerpt":"Every New Years Eve, a group gets together at the Ks and eats, drinks, puts together puzzles, and plays games. 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