| Board Game
News
W. Eric Martin
January 2008
USA
If you ever get the chance to play 10 Days in Asia
with ambassadors from the smaller countries on that
continent, here’s my advice: Don’t. You
will inevitably make comments along the lines of “Brunei
is where?! Why isn’t it in the Middle East as
it should be?” or “Bahrain is the black
hole of travel,” or “Maldives is completely
useless.” International tensions will escalate,
and Bad Things will result.
For gamers not intending to reach out to those in
the Eastern Hemisphere, 10 Days in Asia is a decent
game with a short playing time that includes a minor
educational element. For the basics of game play, let’s
turn to the ever able Ted Cheatham:
Game Overview for the Video Averse
Out of the Box has published four games in the 10
Days series—Europe, Africa, USA, and Asia—and
the game play in each is reminiscent of Rack-O. Players
need to create a travel itinerary that lasts 10 days,
starts and ends in a country or state, and uses legitimate
travel connections each step of the way.
In 10 Days in Asia, players will find 57 country tiles
(one for most countries with large or interconnected
countries like Russia, Iran and India having two) and
21 transportation tiles from which to create an itinerary,
which is represented by a wooden rack with slots for
ten tiles. Each country tile depicts and names the
capital city, in addition to listing the population
and size. While this data is a good selling point to
parents and teachers, I’ll confess that I never
notice such details while playing.
You start the game by drawing face-down tiles one
at a time and filling your rack. This process will
usually create a horribly jumbled travel schedule:
Japan to Sri Lanka to Saudi Arabia to a Railroad to
ship in the Pacific Ocean and so on. Unless you have
a personal teleporter—and something tells me
you don’t—you need to fix up your travel
schedule turn by turn until a legal itinerary emerges.
What kind of connections are legal?
- Adjacent countries, such as China and Mongolia,
can be placed next to one another. To faciliate game
play, some adjacencies have been added to the game,
with lines connecting Cyprus and Turkey, or Taiwan
to China. (Potential sources for additional tension,
mind you, when playing with representatives of those
countries. You’ve been warned.)
- Countries of
the same color can be connected with a similarly-colored
airplane. Countries come in five fruity flavors,
and two airplanes of each color give you a chance
to hop from, say, Yemen to Laos or from Oman to East
Timor. (P.S.: Avoid East Timor)
- Countries on the same
ocean can be connected with the appropriate ocean
liner, either Indian or Pacific. Japan -> Pacific
Ocean -> Phillipines is one
such connection. The boundary between the Indian
and Pacific Oceans places Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia
and Thailand on both bodies of water, which can make
them nice connection points in your travels. Except
for Singapore, that is, which is useless.
- Countries
on the same railroad line can be connected with (no
surprise here) a Railroad tile, which you can go
from Laos to North Korea in just one step. Please
leave the centrifuges behind, thank you.
Each turn, you draw a tile from a face-down deck or
from one of three face-up discard piles, replace one
tile in your rack with the drawn tile (or pass on this
if you don’t like the tile), and discard one
tile to a discard pile. Simplicity itself, in other
words, as turns go round and round until someone completes
the ten day journey and wins.
Travel Preparation
At heart, 10 Days in Asia is an extremely simple game.
Players can make their moves with little planning or
forethought, and eventually one of them will blunder
into victory. If you pay attention to your moves, however,
both during set-up and the game itself, your chances
of winning will be much higher.
During the set-up phase, for example, you want to
create some kind of connection, no matter how minimal,
so that you’re not starting from scratch on turn
one. In one game, I drew China early and set it in
slot one; so many countries are adjacent to China,
I reasoned, that it seemed like I’d surely draw
a connection during the rest of the intro round, and
I did. A few turns into the game, though, I realized
that China should have gone in slot #2 in order to
create two easy-to-fill positions. A lesson for next
time…
While you’re at the mercy of the cards you draw
and other players discard, you can improve your chance
of making connections by not painting yourself into
a corner. I’ve started some games with connections
at the beginning and end of my journey and tried to
force a connection in the middle, but doing so greatly
restricts the percentage of tiles that will be useful
for me. Thus, you need to be ready to abandon travel
plans when the tiles don’t appear or the player
before you snatches them away.
As you might imagine, 10 Days in Asia plays more quickly
with two players than with three, and three is faster
than four. With each additional player in the game,
you have a greater chance of seeing the card you need
picked up from a discard pile or buried. The countries
with the most connections, despite being on two cards,
will be scarcer as players hold on to those travel
hubs and instead dump the obscure spots that are hard
to reach. Even with this added competition, the
game still plays quickly and typically invites a “Let’s
play again” reaction from both gamers and casual
players, with no passport needed…
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