Journey Through Europe

No, sadly, we aren't planning our next big vacation.  In fact, with the possibility of boarding school tuition/room and board/fees/ect, I don't know that we'll ever take a vacation again.  Okay, we probably will.  It just feels overwhelming right now.  It'll all work out.  Right?

Anyway, back to Journey Through Europe.  It's a game.  We got it a while back at Goodwill, but it somehow just sat for a fairly long time.  I got it out for the three of us to play once and it, while I enjoyed it, I thought that Davan really didn't, so I didn't suggest it again for a while.  Still, when we moved, we brought it.  After all, I'd liked it and we'd only played it once.

Recently, I asked Davan if we should just move the game on, as we hadn't been playing it.  No, she said, she'd liked it.  So, we took it out and started playing it again recently (maybe a couple months ago).  We've been playing it fairly regularly ever since.  We even took it to Colorado with us and introduced Oma to the game.

Here's the thing about this game - most of it is setting up.  You have a board with a map of Europe on it.  You get a home city plus eight more city cards.  You plan a route that passes through all those cities and then goes back to your home city.  Some cities are special and there are instructions for those.  You definitely want to plan for those bumps or pushes along the way.

Once your route it planned, a lot of it is luck - how well you role, mostly.

We played this morning over breakfast.  This is Davan doing actual route planning, not posing, even though it looks like I set this up.

We enjoy the game because of it's armchair travel aspect.  Davan really wants to travel and enjoys dreaming about it.  It's also fun to talk about where we've actually been.  In the rule book, there are short blurbs about some of the cities, as well, and sometimes Davan likes to play where she reads about each city that she passes through, if there is an available blurb.  So, one could say that there is a lot of educational value here.

I enjoy the strategy of route planning combined with the luck of the role and the luck of the draw (sometimes the cities are seriously difficult to get to, other times, not so much).  I'm all about the combination of luck and strategy when it comes to games.  All one or all the other is usually not very interesting to me.

Licorice enjoyed the box lid, but couldn't be bothered to actually look at us or anything.

Anyway, if you come across the game at Goodwill or a garage sale or what-have-you, it's well worth picking up.  That said, even though we enjoy it, I'm not sure I'd pay full price.  Of course, it's rare that I think full price is worth paying on games, so you could take that with a grain of salt.