Fictional Reality Magazine
Clay Richmond
December 2006
USA

This relatively small (9" x 9" x 1.5") boxed game contains a 4- page set of instructions, a map board, eight wooden card stands (four of each for days 1 through 5 and days 6 through 10) and sixty six tiles/cards. 10 Days in Europe's theme is that each player is trying to be the first to build a 10-day journey through Europe by walking, flying or boating to various countries. The instructions are concise and easy to understand. The game will start off by mixing up all of the tiles/cards face-down (they are not the kind that you can shuffle so don't try it) and each player taking ten of them, one at a time per player, and assembling them on their wooden racks in any order they want. Once you place a card in your rack it cannot be moved to another position so your starting placement will have a lot to do with how easy or difficult it is to complete your journey.

After each player has filled in his rack with his initial draw of cards play begins. Each turn you can draw a card from a common face-down draw pile or from one of three face-up discard piles. You will then replace one of the cards in your rack with your newly drawn card and discard, face-up to any of the three face-up discard piles, the one you don't want any more. You could end up getting lucky and draw, and place, ten countries as part of your initial draw and win the game right off the bat but I really doubt it's a high enough chance too impact playability. For you to win the game you have to declare that you've finished the 10-day journey and then turn your cards around and prove it to the other players. You travel from one country to the next either on foot (by countries being adjacent to each other so if I had Norway in Day-1 and Sweden in Day-2 that would constitute a good two-day start on my journey), by plane (by having the same color plane in the spot to the left of t he country that I want to go to so I can use a green plane to fly to Albania [green] but not to Austria [yellow]) or by boat (I can use a boat labeled Baltic Sea to reach a country that touches the Baltic Sea). Game play moves along pretty quickly unless someone gets a case of analysis paralysis but that can happen with any game. The box indicates that games should take 20-30 minutes and that's about right even for your first few games when you're still learning your way.

The components are all of very good quality. The map is brightly colored and is easy on the eyes. The font used for each location is easy to read. The board itself is about 17.5" square and won't take up much room at all on your table. The cards show either a country (along with its capital, population and area) or a mode of transportation. The game supports between 2 and 4 players. 10 Days in Europe is not a hardcore game that requires a large investment of either play time or digestion or rules. The game is easy to learn and is a very good gateway game for people that might be more familiar with "traditional" board games like Sorry or Yatzee, but is also something that would work great as a short filler game on a game night when you're waiting for the whole group to get there. It's also a game that you can play with your kids and set them upon the road of playing games for years to come. The price tag on the game is very reasonable and coupled with the nice components and playability for both young and old make it a real value in my book.

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