Travel around the world and great entertainment – review of the board game “80 days”

Have you ever dreamed of following in the footsteps of the English gentleman Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s famous novel Around the World in 80 Days ? Or maybe you are just looking for an extremely addictive party game for an evening with friends?

 

80 Days by the Austrian, 19th-century publisher Piatnik is a simple and aesthetic board game that will allow you to put on the top hats of Victorian gentlemen and grab the umbrellas of French ladies and set off on an urgent adventure!

80 Days – rules of the game

We start the preparation of the game by laying out the board with the map of the world and the cities to visit marked on it. The goal of 80 Days is to circle the globe and return to London – the place from which our journey begins. We also have a side objective that can significantly affect the result – it is to increase the number of points that we can earn by experiencing amazing adventures along the way.

Players choose characters, place pawns on the starting field and set off into the world with suitcases, which over time will fill up with overcoats, shoes or guns, depending on what we need when traveling from point A to point B. We can move by sea , railway or a bit more creative (on elephants or in a hot air balloon). Of course, transport requires payment of a fee, so you constantly have to think about how to get from Russia to Kazakhstan as quickly as possible and what you need for this purpose.

The player with the highest number of points wins, and we can also get these depending on how quickly we reach London (the one of us who does it the fastest gets the most points). So not only adventures on the trail can provide us with them.

A few words about the release

The title is quite unusually published, because we have four language versions available here: (Hungarian, Polish, Czech, and Slovak), equally when it comes to blanks with descriptions of adventures on our way, or instructions. However, the names of the cities on the double-sided map (main board) are only in English. So many wonders.

When it comes to the adventures I mentioned, the creators showed off their creativity. There may be obstacles in our way: a white rabbit straight from Alice in Wonderland , who wants to take us to a mysterious place, or a bookseller who will show us a unique volume. This position is really pleasant to play, and the action is made more pleasant by the illustrations stylized for the nineteenth-century period, which were created by Felix Wermke.

To sum up, for all the reasons listed in this short review, I sincerely recommend this title to all fans of adventure and board games, which may not require a lot of thinking, but are not primitive or undeveloped in any way.