Mille Bornes
card game
Mille Bornes (; French for a thousand milestones, referring to the distance markers on many French roads) is a French designer card game. Mille Bornes is listed in the GAMES Magazine Hall of Fame.
History
The game was created in 1954 by Edmond Dujardin as 1000 Bornes. It is almost identical to the earlier American automotive card game Touring, designed by William Janson Roche in 1906. One additional feature is the coup-fourré ("counter-thrust"), whereby bonus points are earned by holding back a safety card (such as the puncture-proof tire) until an opponent plays the corresponding hazard card (in this case, the flat tire). The game's name is derived from the approximate length of the RN 7 (a national route) connecting Paris with the Italian border.
Dujardin moved to Arcachon southwest of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast of France in 1947, where he and his family began producing the game in the basement of his house at No. 63, Boulevard de la Plage. The box for the original 1954 edition carries the strapline la Canasta de la Route ("Canasta of the Road"), highlighting its similarity to Canasta. The cards are illustrated and hand-lettered by Joseph Le Callennec, a graphic designer from France.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mille Bornes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.