Review

Do you know Bhutan from Brunei? Or Maldives from Myanmar? If so, you'll have an advantage when playing 10 Days in Asia. But if you're like most people who have a hard enough time just figuring out where American states and Canadian provinces are, particularly in relation to each other, this game will be a challenge - yet a fun and educational one as players chart a course across the world's largest continent.

Like the other games in Out of the Box Publishing's 10 Days series (Europe, USA, Africa), 10 Days in Asia is for two to four players, ages 10 and up and takes about 20 to 30 minutes to play. The object of the game is the same as others in the series: to use country and transportation tiles to assemble an itinerary, in this case, across Asia.

The game includes 57 country tiles, with duplicates for seven countries and 23 transportation tiles (although the instructions that came with our game indicated 21). The first person to complete a 10-day journey in which each day legally connects to the subsequent day is the winner.

There are a couple of features that set 10 Days in Asia apart from the other 10 Days games. First, of course, is the region. Asia has numerous irregular boundaries and is spread out more than the other continents, with some countries divided up in seemingly arbitrary fashion.

For example, consider Indonesia, the world's largest archipelagic state, consisting of 17,508 islands. The 10 Days in Asia board includes some of those islands. Also located by Indonesia is a line indicating a division between the Indian and Pacific oceans, an important feature to note when drawing a "ship" tile. Nearby, there's Malaysia, a country that has two distinct geographical areas divided by the South China Sea.

And did we mention islands? Asia has a multitude of island nations: Bahrain, Sri Lanka and Singapore, just to name a few. Some connect to other countries via ferry and bridge connections, which don't require tiles designated for this purpose, while other countries require ship tiles to make it to the mainland, making for tricky game play.

10 Days in Asia has a feature none of the other 10 Days games has: trains representing four railroad lines (Mideast, Siberia, Southeast Asia and China). Railroad tiles are few - only six, compared with 10 airplane tiles and seven ship tiles - and can be used for any of the lines, so a player drawing one of these tiles can use it to leapfrog great distances and connect far-flung places in as little as one day.

In terms of game play, these geographical quirks make for lively conversation, furrowed brows as players huddle around the board to study the map and a better grasp of where some of the world's hot spots are and what might make them that way once you see the places they border.

Overall, 10 Days in Asia, with its mix of strategy and luck, is every bit as fun as the other 10 Days games, and maybe even more so to those who know less about this region of the world and want to learn more.