Globetrotting

“Do you have a flag? No flag, no country!”, Eddie Izzard.

The box had been stored in the garage for many years. Maybe decade and a half.

It displayed some traces of moisture, but nothing too serious, nothing that could not be removed with a dose of sunlight, vacuum the dust and an additional cleaning. The board and the cards inside were in surprisingly good condition.

Other marks, however, were more profound: adhesive tape, thick and black, joining the corners and edges, struggling to maintain the rectangular shape; rough blue ribbon, trying unsuccessfully to keep the board in one single piece; cards with folds and worn surface.

Wear marks coming from the century before. Evidence of much use.

This is another map-based game, with a board full of names, places, locations that do really exist. I count over 350. Some have always been familiar, in stories told, books, films and documentaries, history and geography classes. Other were strange ones, with exotic names, those I happen to memorise faster. With almost no first-hand experience, by then, of all those cities and their streets. Traveling in the wings of imagination, as I also used to do with globes and maps.

The goal is simple: to be the first player to visit a destination on each of the five continents and return to the departing city, marked by its flag, sticked in the map. I remember trying to use the holes from previous matches, thus trying to avoid turning the world into a perforated plan and preventing the pin holes to become so big that flags would not stand.

To win the race around the world you must carefully choose the best route, making use of the red air links, the green railway lines, and the white-dashed sea crossings.

In each turn it is only possible to use a single means of transport, which implies stops to change to another one, either by strategic option or even because there are no alternatives, since there are places only accessible in a single way. A dice roll determines the maximum number of moves between cities, exception made to boat connections, always limited to a single step per turn.

But where to start from and what to visit? The choice will not be ours!

Five colors.
Five sets of cards.
Five continents.
Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania.

Each traveler departs from a different continent, by drawing a card that determines their city of departure and arrival. Next, they all receive a set of five cards, one from each continent stack. These will be the locations to visit, determined by chance.

A basis for other variants, home-made to fill afternoons, in group or solo play. Such as drawing more cards to extend the game duration, using the map, the pawns, and the dice for other races, modifying rules at will.

Some destinations are more feared than others, such as Reykjavik in Iceland. You need three turns to reach it by sea, from Gothenburg, and as many others to make the way back.

Journeys may also face some unforeseen events, represented here in the form of news arriving by cable, a sign of those times. Plans must be adapted, and the new instructions should be immediately followed. That's what will happen to those moving fast, as soon as they roll a six for the third time.

This game did come with some production issues, with repeated cards and cities missing their corresponding card. With some work, checking the pairing one by one, it was possible to manually rectify those failures, by then, at that B.P. age (Before the Printers).

Names of cities and countries. Yesterday and today. In the same place but being part of different realities. The world has changed. One more time. Political geography is now another one.

Belgrade remains Belgrade, but was then part of Yugoslavia and today it is the capital of Serbia. Lourenço Marques became Maputo, after the independence of Mozambique, in 1975. And such examples are manifold, because many were the boundaries that changed.

This edition is a witness of its time: the Cold War era. When there were still two Germanys, the Czechoslovakia, the Yugoslavia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and in which the changes in many African countries were still to happen.

Then there are also a couple of strange options, like in case of the Azores, inhere only associated with the Atlantic Ocean, and not with Portugal.

A part of the history of games and the gaming industry. The version shown here was edited by the Portuguese label Majora. The box and the rule sheet have no mention whatsoever to authorship or to the year of release, as was frequent at the time.

As for the year, taking designations into consideration, we are most probably looking at something from the early 1970s, or late 1960s. This will also hit right in terms of my own age by then.

As for the origins, it was necessary to follow the lead of a tiny detail of the box. At the front, the copyright mark: Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg. With a few searches in the digital world, it quickly  became possible to know a little more. First, thanks to Google and some online sales sites, I identified the original title, Weltreise, and some covers of different editions around the 1950s and 1960s.

With the title in hand, it was then possible to find the game in BoardGameGeek, where game design is credited to Johann Wilhelm Stündt and Jochen Zeiss, and the creation date of the original game is set in 1930.

Otto Maier Verlag was founded by Otto Maier in 1883(!), in the city of Ravensburg. Otto's vision was to bring together entertainment and education, and the company developed over successive family generations. The first game, quite different from the current one, was already called "A Journey around the World", a recurring theme so it seems. Today we know this mark as Ravensburger, with its games and puzzles, and the blue triangle-shaped logo in a corner of the box.

And so this travel note ends here, after a journey across geography, politics, time, and memories.