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Now Broadway Toys has come out with a new edition of 10 Days in Europe, which plays much the same as that earlier game, so for convenience's sake, I'll mostly copy my description from that earlier write-up so that I can focus more on why I love this type of game:
Quote:
10 Days in Europe has a simple concept: Create a row of ten tiles that are all legally connected to represent a trip in Europe. The game includes one tile for most countries in Europe (with six countries appearing twice) along with planes and ships. If you place country tiles adjacent to one another and those countries are adjacent in real life, then you've made a valid connection; if you connect two countries of the same color with a plane of that color, you've made a valid connection; and if you connect two countries with a ship for a body of water that touches both of those countries, you'd made a valid connection.
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To set up the game, you draw tiles one by one, placing each tile somewhere in your ten-day rack without being able to move them after placement. Ideally you can make a few valid connections during this process, and the more that you play, the more you can see the possibilities for connections. Once everyone has filled their rack, players take turns drawing a new tile from the deck or the top of one of the three discard piles, then either discarding the tile (if it's useless) or replacing one tile in their rack with the new one, discarding the older tile. As soon as someone completes a valid ten-day tour, they win!
This is the key sentence for me regarding the 10 Day game series: "Ideally you can make a few valid connections during this process, and the more that you play, the more you can see the possibilities for connections." I cover this topic at length in the overview video below, but I can also demonstrate this through a few examples, starting with a peek at one particular rack after I'd placed the first five tiles:I paused to take a pic before announcing victory...
To set up the game, you draw tiles one by one, placing each tile somewhere in your ten-day rack without being able to move them after placement. Ideally you can make a few valid connections during this process, and the more that you play, the more you can see the possibilities for connections. Once everyone has filled their rack, players take turns drawing a new tile from the deck or the top of one of the three discard piles, then either discarding the tile (if it's useless) or replacing one tile in their rack with the new one, discarding the older tile. As soon as someone completes a valid ten-day tour, they win!
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Everything is set up so wonderfully here! Spain and Russia can be connected with one of the four Atlantic Ocean cards; Estonia, Poland, and Denmark provide four options (thanks to double Denmark) for the Baltic-blue plane connection; multiple pairs of blue and green cards would work to move from blue plane to green plane; and any green card could be plopped at the end of the line. So many possibilities! How did the rest of the set-up pan out?
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Ah, well. Most of my hopes were dashed, but Germany does lie on the Baltic, so one additional connection came through. I can still hope to draw into Estonia, Poland, or Denmark to replace Germany, or I can build off Germany in a number of different ways.
The more you play any of the 10 Days titles — and I've played 10 Days in Europe 57 times at this point, 41 of those plays on a review copy of the Broadway Toys edition with my exchange student Lisa —the more you're able to visualize potential connections, both during set-up and in the actual playing of the game.
Here's the start of another game:
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Yes, luck certainly plays a role in the game. I happened to draw four transportation cards in my first five cards, and I was able to set up the yellow-to-yellow-to-yellow hop that I can fill with almost anything during set-up since I can swap in almost any yellow cards for the first two slots later. (I say "almost any" because if the yellow country has a green one adjacent to it, I'd prefer to slot it into the yellow-to-green zone.) Latvia is the sole possible link between the green plane and the Baltic, so that's not ideal, but a connection is still possible.
And then...
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Six transportation cards during set-up is too much of a good thing, but it does give you options during the game itself. I can still try to work with the yellow planes, or I can switch to the orange plane/Atlantic/green plane combo. The three cards at the end of the tour are connected, but they don't relate to anything else, so I'll need to start looking at a Atlantic-X-X-Sweden connection or ditch those latter cards. Depends on what comes available.
Once you play this many games, you start seeing things that fall on the rarer end of the tour spectrum, such as this "all walking" trip:
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Or this color-blocked trip:
I find this image beautiful in its simplicity. This rack started to come together in these two colors, then I was like, I have to make this happen — and I did!
I've won approximately four-fifths of the games that I've played with Lisa, but I'm delighted that she keeps coming back for more. I think she thinks the game has a lot of luck in it — and it does! — so she keeps hoping it falls her way, but she hasn't yet figured out how to bend it in her favor the way that I've been doing. More thoughts on the game in this video:
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