When I was in 7th grade I used ResEdit to do a total conversion of the Macintosh version of Mille Bornes for a French class project. The provided theme was “La Vie Est (Et?) Belle.”
My French teacher really had no clue how to receive it. He didn’t really understand how I made an entire computer card game. My more tech aware home room teacher went to bat for me and eventually I won a school award and got to eat lunch with the principal.
This was definitely a formative moment in my computer programming career.
My grandparents had it, and we used to play all the time in the 1970s and 1980s. The deck they had was a real antique even back then.
I think they actually had two decks. Based on photos from BoardGameGeek[1], one deck was probably from the 1940s and the other from the 1920s or 1930s.
It was a fun game, and even as a kid I enjoyed the cool retro art.
Mille Bornes is a clone of Touring plus a few things:
Dujardin described 1000 Bornes,1 as “la Canasta de la Route,” but the game is not based on canasta but rather on William Janson Roche's 1906 classic Touring, with the addition of safety cards and the novel Coup fourré play. - the article at hand
My 8 and 11y old daughters love playing it. They really don't mind the old card design. We also built a "circuit" with cardboard where we use my old micro machines cars to visualize our trip.
We also play with our own rules where there is no need to find a greenlight after reparing/changing wheel/refueling the car. Otherwise it is always the player getting the 'véhicule prioritaire' (aka firefighters card) who win and it spoils the fun.
My kids have the Cars movie version of the Mille bornes. In my mind, the Cars design ruins the whole game, it's no longer special to me. Plus it's really hard to tell the card types without looking carefully at the small logos in the corners. All the cards have cars on it! It just feel like any random cheap Disney board game.
In the summer of 1997 I actually made my own Mille Bornes card set by hand (after finding the card distribution on the (new) web) to pass the time while studying in Taiwan.
If 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.
I'm not sure if it was first, but I know curses was instrumental in making Rogue possible (which in turn eventually inspired an entire genre of games). The Rogue authors used curses and Ken Arnold eventually ended up contributing directly to the game.
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.
We 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.
I'm weirded out because I thought about the game for the first time in about 15 years just a few days ago (after seeing a speed limit sign and a severe tire damage sign in close proximity to each other) only to have it pop up on HN.
French here, I recently read the original description of the game from an original edition of the game when I went to a friend’s old place, and I was laughing out loud for real.
The description is brilliant! Just the right amount of self-derogatory arrogance needed to make me laugh :)
I had played it before, but it was the first time I read the original rules book.
We played a lot of this when I was a kid… our edition had the 1960s French artwork. When my sister bought a new copy a few months back to play while my dad was in the hospital, she made sure to find one with the classic artwork. It really is a lot more charming than newer styles.
She got it off of Amazon, but I'm not sure which of the ones listed was the one she ordered. Sorry :-(. This one looks most similar: https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Fast-Paced-Strategy-Playtime-... but I'm pretty sure it had the French text on it, not English.
The 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 around broken down. It was more fun when both teams were rolling along in the race, trying to inch past one another with the milestone cards.
The whole "waiting for a green light to just start" is the problem, I think. We have house rules that limit the cases where you need a green light, and the pace is much better. And less frustrating.
Readit News
My French teacher really had no clue how to receive it. He didn’t really understand how I made an entire computer card game. My more tech aware home room teacher went to bat for me and eventually I won a school award and got to eat lunch with the principal.
This was definitely a formative moment in my computer programming career.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_(card_game)
... which leads to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touring_(card_game)
My grandparents had it, and we used to play all the time in the 1970s and 1980s. The deck they had was a real antique even back then.
I think they actually had two decks. Based on photos from BoardGameGeek[1], one deck was probably from the 1940s and the other from the 1920s or 1930s.
It was a fun game, and even as a kid I enjoyed the cool retro art.
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[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2253/touring/versions
Dujardin described 1000 Bornes,1 as “la Canasta de la Route,” but the game is not based on canasta but rather on William Janson Roche's 1906 classic Touring, with the addition of safety cards and the novel Coup fourré play. - the article at hand
Note that French typically does not capitalize individual words in a title as English does.
I knew there were a few different editions, but had no idea there were so many! My family's set is the 1960 design.
We also play with our own rules where there is no need to find a greenlight after reparing/changing wheel/refueling the car. Otherwise it is always the player getting the 'véhicule prioritaire' (aka firefighters card) who win and it spoils the fun.
I'm feeling old. :D
In the summer of 1997 I actually made my own Mille Bornes card set by hand (after finding the card distribution on the (new) web) to pass the time while studying in Taiwan.
edited for reduced ambiguity.
I had played it before, but it was the first time I read the original rules book.
This game is great. Practice yelling in French.
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 around broken down. It was more fun when both teams were rolling along in the race, trying to inch past one another with the milestone cards.
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.
makes me wonder if it's a bad experience, or if there some some personality trait that makes these games unfun for some.