Mille Bornes

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.

I played this a ton as a kid, and to this day, I sometimes shout Coup-fourré! when I have an instant rebuttal to something...

I knew there were a few different editions, but had no idea there were so many! My family's set is the 1960 design.

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.

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.

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.

Weird. We started building a Mille Bornes clone game at work last week based on a particular data problem we are facing.

This game is great. Practice yelling in French.

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.

We had a set when I was a kid in the 70s in the US. I might still have it. We played it a lot. It wasn't a hard game, and it was a simple way to pass some hours. Lots of good family memories there.

I used to play a lot of this with my grandmother and cousins when I was a child. Later I happened to work in the factory mentionned in the article, which was at the time rented as warehouse and office for an E-commerce company. There was a huge Dujardin logo painted on the outer wall, which was preserved when they repainted the building [0]

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/2HMq4m4qkCH6FtYa6

Never played it, but as a child i played a lot of a very similar (i believe) game called Nautic Miles, in which you try to get your convoys across the ocean in the face of various attacks from your enemy. The moves (that i can remember) are to play a convoy card of some value from your hand, face down; to add a miles card to a convoy (scoring it if it reaches 4000 miles); to expose one of your opponent's convoys using a radar card; to stop one of your opponents' convoys using a storm card; to release one of your storm-bound convoys using a fair weather card; to sink one of your opponent's convoys using a mine card (unless they can counter with a minesweeper card); to attack one of your opponent's convoys with a warship card (which they can counter with a stronger warship card, which you can counter with a yet stronger warship card, etc); and some form of air attack, which could be foiled if your opponent had an aircraft shot down card. There was also something about alerts; maybe you had to lay an alert card on a convoy before you could attack it (except with a mine!).

How many times did i successfully press an attack, at the expense of multiple cards, only to discover that i had sunk the worthless chalutier?

It dates from the '80s, but has rather elegant art deco card designs:

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/540087/nautic-miles

https://paille-editions.com/V2/produit/nautic-miles/

I played it about 50 years ago. Did one occasionally have a chance to exclaim "au secours"?

One of the teens who baby sat my sister and I had this game. It's great reading comment of others who enjoyed this game as much as I did.

Simple game but was part of my childhood as well.

I tried to introduce it to my board game group, alas it's too simple for them to appreciate. Ah well.

I have a deck of these cards from the 80s in very good condition (except the box is not in good shape). Let me know if you want it and if you live in Seattle I'll give it to you (or I can mail it if you want to pay shipping).

I was not expecting to read about Mille Bornes today.

The original graphics stand up pretty darn well.

Set 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.

I remember playing this several years ago. I'm convinced that the Right of Way card is massively overpowered. It felt like whoever got it basically always won.

I played many hours of this game with my brothers on a 1990's Shareware CD. Great memories, and we always had a great time playing!

The part that kept me coming back as a child was feeling of completely stonewalling my little brother and getting a "shut out"

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.

We bought the 'Mario'-themed version of Mille borne: what a mistake! The original version is much more understandable..

Loved that game. I played those 1982 cards as a kid with my mom when we'd go on skiing trips.

There was a version of this for the 68k Macintosh that I played the heck out of.

I remember playing this as a kid! Must have been more than 25 years ago...

nothing screams "professional" like putting quotes around French spelling mistakes.

What's the point here? That a French editor doesn't know the gender of the word "édition"? Highly unlikely.

I'm very grumpy today.