Mille Bornes

Mille Bornes is a card game for two to eight players in which each player, or team, races to cover exactly one thousand kilometres. The deck holds 106 cards: distance cards from 25 to 200 kilometres, hazards such as the flat tyre, the empty tank and the red light, remedies that cancel them, and four safeties, among them the puncture-proof tyre and the driving ace. A safety held back until an opponent plays the matching hazard scores a coup fourré.

The game was the work of Edmond Dujardin, a printer of highway code manuals who had settled in Arcachon on the Atlantic coast. He adapted it in 1954 from Touring, an American motoring card game of 1906, borrowing from canasta the idea of a long game played in teams, and sold it as la Canasta de la Route. Its name refers to the old milestones of the Route Nationale 7, which runs about a thousand kilometres from Paris to the Italian border.

The first sets were made in the basement of Dujardin's house, then in a former fish cannery in the town. A redrawn edition followed in 1960, the rulebook now commended by bridge champions, and Parker Brothers took the game to North America, where for a time it outsold Monopoly. Through a bankruptcy in 1980 and a series of later owners, the Dujardin name and the game survived together.

The cards have been redrawn several times, and a 2024 prestige edition revived the look of the early ones, but play has barely changed. Players still deal six cards, lay a green light to set off and argue over whether to extend from seven hundred to a thousand. Dujardin, now part of the Dutch group Jumbo, sells it as Mille Bornes Classique, alongside the many themed versions that have grown from it.