Belgian here, (not French) our family played this a lot. I don't remember how to play it, but I remember it being tons of fun.
Mille Bornes
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Mille Bornes
#52The last time our family played it became frustrating: one team being unable to even get their car rolling off the starting line — waiting, waiting for the magic cards to fix a flat, get a green light, etc. The opposing team had wonderful hands and were ruthless. I kept thinking that there's a fun game in here, but not with the current rules/deck. I think a driving game should have more driving ... less sitting aroun…
Got this recently for my kids and was pleasantly surprised that the current rules no longer require a GO card after recovering from an incident.
In that case the Priority card is a lot less valuable! (maybe that's OK)
Re: Mille Bornes
#53If you have a BSD system, or if you have bsdgames installed, you can run "mille" to play Mille Bornes. This version was done by Ken Arnold, who also created the curses library. Even better, I seem to remember that Mille Bornes was the first program to use curses, but I can't find a citation for that now.
And on Debian and presumably derivatives there are packages xmille as well as bsdgames which includes mille. edited for reduced ambiguity.
xmille is no longer (since bullseye) a package in Debian, instead xmille is provided by kgames.
Re: Mille Bornes
#54Set the Way-Back machine to 1974. I was not quite 4 years old. I loved the game.
So much that when we moved that year, my parents conveniently "lost" it for a few months.
Re: Mille Bornes
#55If you have a BSD system, or if you have bsdgames installed, you can run "mille" to play Mille Bornes. This version was done by Ken Arnold, who also created the curses library. Even better, I seem to remember that Mille Bornes was the first program to use curses, but I can't find a citation for that now.
And if that's the same program I played (30ya, argh), the computer managed to win on a regular basis. Proof of (a) good in-game AI, or (b) the role of luck, or (c) my ineptitude.
Re: Mille Bornes
#56The last time our family played it became frustrating: one team being unable to even get their car rolling off the starting line — waiting, waiting for the magic cards to fix a flat, get a green light, etc. The opposing team had wonderful hands and were ruthless. I kept thinking that there's a fun game in here, but not with the current rules/deck. I think a driving game should have more driving ... less sitting aroun…
>I kept thinking that there's a fun game in here, but not with the current rules/deck.
Exactly what I thought as a preschooler.
We had a neighbor with another preschooler and they had a treasure trove of toys left over from his older brothers who were more than 10 years older.
But Mille Bornes was not one of the old ones, it was like new and nobody had ever gotten much use out of it.
This was why, and we quickly made up entirely new games using the cards in combination with a number of other rapidly emerging plastic playthings.
Re: Mille Bornes
#57Re: Mille Bornes
#58We played this a lot with my babysitter growing up. It's fun for kids, and the graphic design on the older editions is so slick and jet set era. But I'm a little weirded out by this, because I've heard about Mille Bornes twice in the last week, and not a single time in the 30 years prior to it.
It's weird because we don't notice the millions of times coincidental real-world follow ups don't happen
Good point. Also stuff often comes in waves (as opposed to a random distribution over time) due to network effects, etc.