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Or, couples who meet playing board games make nerdy honeymoon plans

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NOTE
I’ve been working on this post since… April 2023. A combination of work, ADHD, and perfectionism had delayed this until now. I was inspired to finish writing this while reading Winnie Lim’s travelogue documenting her trip to Japan, and gentle coaxing by my wife, and convinced to publish it by quite a few gamers in our circle asking for it.

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Unboxing the Idea

My wife and I met while playing board games. We’d both moved back to Mumbai in 2014-15 and had found the community via Meetup and Reddit. When we first started dating in 2017, we took a trip to Alibaug, where we spent a day reading in our room and playing Fog of Love. We had such a good time doing that, we decided to make board games a part of all trips we take together. Later, a lot of things that we had seen online or had talked to people about started to coalesce into the seed for our Very Nerdy Honeymoon^tm.

It started, like many things do, with a post on Reddit. Some gamers had posted about playing Carcassonne in Carcassonne.¹ We had wanted to go to Europe, and but couldn’t really settle on an itinerary other than really wanting to visit France. Suddenly, here was an idea that felt us. After all, There are a lot of games based in Europe, and especially a lot in France.

We quickly realised that this trip would be expensive. Multiple cities, not wanting to stay in hostels on our honeymoon, and of course, the board games themselves, all added up to much more than we had in our accounts back then. We decided to plan and build our engine (save our money) until we could travel the way we want.² We talked about our plans to our friends who, down to the last one, were very excited about our idea. They had suggestions of games for us to play on the trip. The Wish List kept getting longer

We were even quoted about our plans in an article about board games in India!

Is It Our Turn Yet?

For the last few years, we’ve been working as independent filmmakers. It’s simultaneously exciting and gruelling. We’d expected to save for a year or two (after adding the gifts we received as wedding presents) and then travel for our honeymoon. But you know what they say about best laid plans. The pandemic hit and the market for independent cinema changed. While we worked as hard as we could, we never lost sight of our goals. Even though we knew that we would have to delay our honeymoon.

Hard work and keeping good relationships got us the opportunity to co-produce Ghaath, an incredible work of independent cinema. It had already been selected at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, but needed our assistance to get there, and it was wonderful to provide the film with the support that it and the team needed to get there. 

It’s Our Turn? We Weren’t Paying Attention!

After a few years of saving and grinding in the trenches, we had the opportunity to go to Berlinale! We were going to be traveling as delegates of the festival. We suddenly realised that we could extend our trip and make our honeymoon happen. Now we only had to buy tickets, apply for visas, book our hotels, plan our itineraries around France, and, most importantly, get our hands on all the games that we wanted to play. 

Once again, we asked for game suggestions from /r/boardgames and our friends, with whom we borrowed and traded games that we wanted to take with us. It was a frantic three weeks, and by the middle of February 2023, we found ourselves in Berlin for the festival. Since Berlin and Berlinale isn’t the point of this post, I’m going to say that it was an amazing experience, and move on. We were in Europe, carrying a suitcase full of board games, so that is what I’m going to write about for the remainder of this post. 

Turn 1: Berlin

Since we were starting our trip in Berlin, we wanted to find a game to play there. We got a few suggestions, like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Hansa Tuetonica, and Fields of Arle. I briefly considered trying to find an old copy of Thurn and Taxis. But none of these games were specific to Berlin.

A while before our trip, a friend from Germany who was visiting India taught us how to play Secret Hitler. It was so much fun that we had our hearts set on playing in Berlin. We couldn’t find a copy before we left, and were worried that it wouldn’t really be appropriate to carry the game into Germany. 

Our friend lived in Berlin and hosts a regular meet-up that included board games. We hoped that we could play the game when we met up but that plan didn’t pan out. But since we were in Berlin, there was no shortage of board game meetups that we could attend.

We went to the meetup at Brewdog where we met a lot of new people, including many from India who were living in the metro Berlin area. We had hoped that there would be a game at the pub that fit our requirement of being about Berlin. We taught a group how to play Kingdomino and as we were about to leave, when we found a group that was sitting down to play Secret Hitler!

We asked if we could join them. Once we shared our honeymoon gaming plans, the group was all too happy to let us join them. No one knew how to play it yet, so Vaidehi quickly taught it. We played 2 rounds of trying to stop the fascists.

The fascists won both times :(.

We also visited SpeilBret where we splurged on several games, including Zug um Zug and a few expansions. We bought Sagrada as a present for my brother, and because they loved our honeymoon idea³, they threw in a few extra cards for it. We can’t thank them enough for that!

Turn 2: Dijon

We don’t own Castles of Burgundy. I am not a fan of the art, and that means that the game wouldn’t be tabled in our house very often at all. Both of us are huge fans of pretty. Ugly games will be played but not owned.

But we were to be in Dijon, and staying within walking distance of a castle. So, we borrowed a friend’s copy and were determined to play it. We found a lovely little restaurant in Place de la Resistance. The staff were confused by this Indian couple who wanted to sit for a few hours in a windy 0°C at one of their outdoor tables, but were perfectly fine with us playing a board game as we had lunch.

We also visited Jocade, an absolutely wonderful boardgames store. They were very welcoming, very excited that we were on a super nerdy honeymoon, and very helpful about our questions . We got a small expansion for Carcassonne, and their own game for Essen.

There’s a running joke in our gaming circle that if we ever play Love Letter, I’m going to be the princess. So, of course, when we saw a game called Princesse we had to take a photo with me in front of it for the group.

Turn 3: Carcassonne

And now we get to the genesis of this adventure. This is a game that we didn’t carry because we knew that we could and wanted to buy the game there from a shop inside the walled city. We were traveling at the start of spring, but a wicked cold snap that lasted for the entirety of our trip meant we were seeing an unexpected amount of winter instead of the spring weather we had anticipated, so it was only appropriate that we bought the Winter Edition of Carcassonne. I have to argue that this is the prettiest version of the game. The normal edition’s green and brown tiles are nice. The white and pale blue tiles are gorgeous. Many of them have small details like animals or campsites that have nothing to do with the game itself. They’re just there because theme. It evokes a really cosy feeling. Just have a cup of hot chocolate while you play this edition and you’ll see what I mean.

We played the game twice in Carcassonne, both times sitting outdoors while looking at the walled city while we played it. In the time-lapse, we were actually trying to beat the rain that was clearly coming in, and we even played the last few moves as the first raindrops started falling⁴!

Here is where our plan started to go a little sideways. We were not always able to play the games in the specific location where the game was set. Either we didn’t find tables large enough to table the games or the weather wasn’t interested in allowing us to play outdoors while sitting on the grass.

We carried the games to wherever we planned on playing them. If we could, we played the game. If we couldn’t, we took a picture with the game and then played them back in our hotel room⁵. There was space on the bed, and also, it was warmer and dryer than it was outside.

Paris was also made more memorable by Vaidehi’s cousin, Anjali who was doing an internship in Paris while we were traveling. It was very exciting to spend multiple days exploring Paris with her. 

Turn 4a: Prêt-à-Porter

I’ve wanted to buy Prêt-à-Porter since I got into gaming and heard about the game.

Then I married Vaidehi, who is a costume designer and personal stylist. We were both keen on getting Prêt-à-Porter for our own collection and the reissue Kickstarter took place right around our wedding. A friend funded us backing a copy of the reissue as a wedding present. Determined to play it in Paris, we unboxed it the day before we left Mumbai. We tried to play it in a café on Champs Elysees but that didn’t work. This was when we realised it might be harder to play games in the appropriate locations than we had hoped. At least not this time…

Anjali joined us for the game despite not being much of a board gamer herself, And soundly beat me.

Turn 4b: Paris

Paris was a game that wasn’t on our radar until a friend of ours was moving out of the country and we noticed that he had the game. It looked fantastic, and we traded our Kickstarter copy of Dinosaur Island for it. While it was a hard call, we have no regrets. It is a fantastic area control game, and the 3D Arc de Triomphe is really fun to see in the middle of the board.

Turn 4c: Rococo

Rococo is one of our favourite games for the theme and how tight it can be. This is the game that I bought when I couldn’t find Prêt-à-Porter. It’s a game that Vaidehi and I love and will table any time that we can. Vaidehi loves to joke about how close to work it feels for her. And yet, she has so much fun playing the game. She also wins it very often.

Along with Anjali, another friend of ours was also in Paris for an MBA course. Riddhi is a gamer through and through⁶, so we were really excited about playing together again.

We carried the game to Versailles, hoping to play it there, but the weather and the lack of usable tables worked against us. We weren’t able to play the game with her, but we’ll try to rectify that when we see her next.

Turn 4d: Montmartre

This was a happy accident. We went on walking tours in every place we visited⁷. We signed up for one to explore Monmarte and learn about its history. Unfortunately, there were several dogs in our group that day. Vaidehi has a deep seated fear of dogs and as friendly as these puppers were, we were too tired to walk on with them while managing her phobia for several hours.

We ducked out at the first stop – Café des 2 Moulins – the café featured in Amélie. We had discovered Montmarte at Jocade, back in Dijon. It’s a lovely little trick taking game. You play as collectors who are scouting art fairs in Monmarte for the next upcoming artist. It is a simple, and beautifully illustrated game. It’s simple, quick to set up, play, and put away. Definitely a game to keep in your bag for short breaks in your day. 

Turn 4e: Truffle Shuffle

We played Truffle Shuffle a few times during the trip. But this play was an excuse to visit Angelina and have some of their wonderful hot chocolate again. We had gone to their outlet in Versailles, and couldn’t pass up the chance to visit their main location in Paris.

This is the only game for which I don’t have a record of the scores 🙁

Turn 5: Zug Um Zug Everywhere

First, Zug um Zug is a much better name than Ticket to Ride. It just sounds like a train, doesn’t it? Second, we both love the games and decided to go a bit nuts with the expansions.⁸ So, while in Europe, we picked up:

• Deutschland
• Nederlands
• France/Old West
• India/Switzerland

The plan was then to play Zug um Zug while on the train from Berlin from Dijon. Unfortunately, we didn’t consider that the tray tables might be too small to put the board out or that the train banks pretty steeply while at top speed, so we wouldn’t have been able to keep the board on the table for the full game. We played the games in the map country as much as we could.

Zug um Zug is an alternate base game to the Ticket to Ride U.S.A. map. It has similar tight regions on the edges (north and south of Germany versus the east and west of the U.S.A.), and is relatively open in the middle. It has neighbouring country destinations like Switzerland, and an interesting combination of long and short tickets. Overall, I think it’s a more interesting base game once you’ve played a few rounds of the U.S.A. map. I also really appreciate the regular sized cards as opposed to the mini cards from the original game.

Nederlands was the map that surprised us the most. It’s a fast game, and from the reading of the rules, a pretty mean one. Every route costs money to build in addition to trains. The first player pays the bank, and the next player has to pay the player who built the line first. Money is tight in the game, and oh, if you take a loan from the bank, you’re out of contention for winning the game.

We didn’t play India/Switzerland on our trip because we didn’t visit Switzerland. That’s mostly for us to play at home.

Turn 6: D&D at 300 km/h!

What we managed on the train was to play in our regular D&D 5E game using a combination of the in train WiFi and our data plans. Our game has been online only since the start of the pandemic, and we have a regular player who joins in from the US. It was a blast, and we managed to get a few games in while on our trip.

Finishing Touches: Assorted Games

Port Royale was a game that Vaidehi loves and that I had never played. So, we bought it. Once we learned how to play it, it became something that we could get a quick game in when we didn’t have the time or energy to set up a bigger game.

We also played a few extra games at the meetup in Berlin that I didn’t record our plays for. I know that Kingdomino was one of them, but the rest just slip my mind…

Packing Up: Unplayed Games

We also carried a few games that we had planned to play, but didn’t have a chance to. These were The Resistance: Avalon, Orléans, and Le Havre.

We skipped playing Avalon because it was really cold while we were in Dijon, and it didn’t seem like we would be able to find a group to play with if we did the day trip.

For Orléans, and Le Havre, it was mostly because of ongoing strikes across France in March 2023. We first ran into it on our way from Carcassonne to Paris. We arrived at the station to board our train only to find it cancelled. After a little bit of time, we figured out that all the trains from Carcassonne had been cancelled. The times that were on the board were for the busses that were operating instead. Once we did the calculations, we realised that we wouldn’t be able to make our connecting train from Narbonne to Paris using a bus(which was still operational), we quickly took a very expensive taxi and caught our connecting train.

So, while we had initially planned on day trips to Le Havre and Orleans while using Paris as our base, we didn’t want to chance getting stuck in those cities because we missed notification of a strike. Plus, we can always play them when we go back to visit next time.

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1. This is a thing. Board-gamers playing board games in the city that they are in.
   
   /u/zimbim played Bruges in Bruges, while watching In Bruges. And there are suggestions for games to be played in that thread, plus reports from gamers about games they’ve played.
   
   Here’s one Redditor playing Carcassonne in Carcassonne while looking at Carcassonne castle
   
   A BGG user playing Carcassonne inside Carcassonne
   
   Some games played in the location ↩︎
2. Yes, we delayed our honeymoon just a bit. We wanted to do it our way. Our trip wound up being 41 days in total, which the immigration officer on our way home pointed out was 10 days for each year of being married :). That made both of us very happy. ↩︎
3. This was a common reaction when we told people that we were on our honeymoon, and it was themed around board games. ↩︎
4. Don’t worry. The game is fine. ↩︎
5. It was our honeymoon and our rules to bend as we needed. Let’s call this one a house rule. ↩︎
6. She’s a board gamer too, and also used to own the wonderful board game café Creeda. It’s sadly closed now. The pandemic and lockdown was hard on businesses that were dependent social interaction. ↩︎
7. I can’t recommend Guru Walk enough. We attended several in Berlin and Paris that were a lot of fun to be on. The guides are knowledgeable and give wonderful recommendations for places to check out and eat at. ↩︎
8. We decided against picking up Amsterdam because we wanted to have some rules about buying games. Since we weren’t just visiting the cities, we decided that only country editions or maps could be purchased. ↩︎