Three of us this week met at my house. There were still plenty of new Essen releases to try and this is one I was quite keen to sample due to a positive review from Mik Svellov.

The basic premise is simple: A race around the world taking as few days as possible. The board shows ten locations and the idea is to visit each location in turn by playing appropriate travel cards. Each route will require the player to play a number of travel cards (ship and/or train) to move to the new city and each card shows how many days it takes to move using that card. On each round, travel cards are revealed and each card will allow the player also to perform a certain action. Players on their turn will take one of these cards; carry out the associated action; move to the next location (if they can and wish to); work out how many days the turn has added to their journey; and discard down to 6 cards if necessary. There are bonuses for being the first player and last player to visit a location, which can benefit players who hang back a bit, but this usually means, unless they catch up, they are going to receive penalty days at the end for taking more game rounds to complete their journey. At the end of the game, the winner is either the player who used fewest days to get back to London, if this is 80 days or less, otherwise whoever reached London first no matter how many days it took.

In our game, we all tried to move locations every turn. There were a couple of instances where moving would have seen a player bump into the detective (adding a couple of days to the journey time) so we chose not to progress. The key to the game, however, proved to be being able to collect pairs of identical travel cards, which halved the normal journey time between cities. Nige seemed to get the cards falling just right for him but did use the opportunities these presented very well. Pairs seemed to elude me throughout the game and even though I held back to try and get low scoring cards, it wasn't enough to put me below Nige's supersonic circumnavigation of the globe in just 63 days. We all felt this was a nice light game that would be good for families both in terms of theme and ease of play. For gamers though, the decisions were fairly obvious and the right cards falling at the right time were the key to winning. However, I would definitely play this again as the theme is one I enjoyed and there was enough there to make it an enjoyable experience.