A couple of nights ago, my wife and I continued our recent effort to play many of the long-unplayed games in our junk game room. We pulled out the delightful card game Mad Dash and enjoyed it. So it seemed logical to play that US state connectivity card game's bigger sibling--World Dash. After all, Mad Dash took only 28 minutes to play and was most pleasant, so wouldn't the same thing on a world scale be similar?

Components
World Dash is a good bit heftier than Mad Dash. Not only is the box bigger, but there are mounted boards and a lot more cards. What you get:

- Cards and lots of 'em. There are only 50 cards (one per state) in Mad Dash, but there are cards for most countries in World Dash. A few countries share cards (say, two small Eastern European countries or two neighboring island nations). On each card is the map of the country and one or two cities listed in the middle of the card (largest city and, if different, capital city). The region of the world is also shown ("East Africa and Middle East" or "South America"). Some cards simply show a body of water (Indian Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific). The cards are divided into two decks, one labeled "East" and one labeled "West". Ocean cards have no points on the card; island countries have a point value of two; all other cards have a value of one.

- Two large boards which have world maps (color coded to the cards) and an area for laying out cards side by side (your "journey" path). The board also has areas for placing your cards so that you can sort out your hand into individual regional stacks.

- Rules, scorepad, and a 3-minute sand timer (or you can use a kitchen timer)

The components are quite good.

Rules
The game consists of two rounds, each of which consists of two phases as follows.

Phase I:

a) Deal out a cards from one of the two decks (first "West", later "East"). Though there are only two boards, you can play with up to four players by sharing. So you'll either end up with a lot of cards or a near-unmanageable number of cards, depending upon the number of players.

b) Start the timer (they suggest 6 minutes for beginners)

c) Everyone sorts their cards by region and then starts making chains of bordering cards. For instance, one may go from Cuba to Atlantic Ocean to United States to Canada to Atlantic Ocean (if you have more than one Atlantic card) to ... and so on. The goal is to create a journey through the deck (East or West) that touches on multiple continents. When the timer runs out, stop.

Phase II (scoring):

a) Each players journey is evaluated (if a player worked on multiple paths, they must select only one journey for scoring). Count up the value of all cards in the chain and record that on the score sheet. In addition, add a bonus point for each continent reached (there are 4 continents in the West deck and three in the East). Finally, note on the scoresheet where the player's journey began and ended.

b) Challenge time. One of your opponents selects one of the cards in your chain (the rules say that opponents should score each other's journeys). That player then asks you to name either the largest city or capital city of one of the countries on one of your cards. [Note: in our game, we randomly selected the card for this, though the rules make it seem that you can go straight for the least familiar country in the journey.] If you can answer the question, you get a three point bonus for the round.

Then play the second (East) round in the same manner. Finally, if the two rounds (West, then East) created a round-the-world voyage you get a seven point bonus (e.g. West went from Pacific to USA to Atlantic to Morrocco to Atlantic and then East went from Atlantic to Indian to Sri Lanka to Indian to Pacific to Japan to Pacific you would have a global voyage).

High score wins.

Our Game
The good news: it took only 24 minutes.

The bad news: it was a long 24 minutes.

While the game sounds quite fun in the vein of Mad Dash, it falls short. First off, it takes a long time to sort out all the cards. I played this on December 23, 1996 with three other people (the scoresheet was still in the box) and that didn't seem so bad, because we each had fewer cards to look through. But in a two-player game, you have a huge mess o'cards.

In addition, you are unlikely to be familiar with a lot of these countries. In fact, I just punted on four African nations because I wasted a precious 45 seconds without finding them on the world map. I know the idea is to learn these sorts of things, and I'm all for that. But not at breakneck pace. I'm just more comfortable with a US map than with a world map.

So, we muddled through and made some chains. We even happened to guess properly on the four challenge questions, two of which weren't hard at all (largest city in Morrocco, capital of Ireland, capital of Bulgaria, and largest city in Russia).

Verdict
In the end, my wife won the game 39 to 34. In retrospect, it doesn't sound so horrible, though at the time, we were just wanting it to be over. That may be simply because we played the better game--Mad Dash--first. It may be the late hour (ended at 11:40 p.m.). But after a couple of days to reflect, I think I'd give it another chance.

Did it get better in those two intervening days? No. But we did play an even worse world mapping game (Maptitude). That review is just around the corner.