Game Overview: 10 Days in the USA, or Winding from Chicago to L.A.

Game Overview: 10 Days in the USA, or Winding from Chicago to L.A.
Board Game: 10 Days in the USA
Board Game: 10 Days in the USA
Games come and games go — then sometimes games come again, often to be discovered by an audience that maybe heard about the design but never got the chance to play it.

Along those lines, 10 Days in the USA from designers Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum is back on the market (following original publisher Out of the Box's demise in 2015) in a new edition from Hong Kong publisher Broadway Games, with art by Jacqui Davis. The only editions that exist at the moment are a Korean edition and Broadway's dual Chinese/English edition, but ideally more will come in time (and the BGG Store picked up some of the Broadway edition for resale in case they don't).

10 Days in the USA has a simple concept: Create a row of ten tiles that are all legally connected to represent a trip in the United States. The game includes a tile for each of the fifty U.S. states along with cars and planes. If you place state tiles adjacent to one another and those states are adjacent in real life, then you've made a valid connection; if you connect two states of the same color with a plane of that color, you've made a valid connection; and if you connect two states with a car that represents a state adjacent to both of those states, you'd made a valid connection.


From gallery of W Eric Martin


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.

I've played 10 Days in the USA more than fifty times on the old edition, along with three games on the newer edition, and I love this game, in addition to the others in the series: Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. (Broadway plans to release a new edition of 10 Days in Europe before the end of 2019, and the games can be combined should you want to play "20 Days Across the Atlantic" or whatever you'd care to call it.)

The luck factor can seem high as sometimes a player draws exactly what they need to tie together two legs of the trip, but you can also make your own luck by tracking the tiles that opponents pick up and drop off as well as by engineering situations on your rack that can be solved by multiple tiles. When I received the new version of the game, I played it three times with two players who had never played previously, and I won each time because I had a better understanding of how to set up my initial rack and make my draws work for me. More thoughts on the game in this overview:


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