Mille Bornes Rules — How to Play and Keep Score
Mille Bornes is a French card game about a road trip that keeps going wrong. You lay down distance cards to cover kilometres while your opponents throw flat tyres, accidents and speed limits at you. Each hand you either complete the trip or run out of cards, and the score sheet turns kilometres and mishaps into points. First side to 5000 wins.
Score a game of Mille Bornes →
Overview
Mille Bornes is a French card game about a road trip that keeps going wrong. You lay down distance cards to cover kilometres while your opponents throw flat tyres, accidents and speed limits at you. Each hand you either complete the trip or run out of cards, and the score sheet turns kilometres and mishaps into points. First side to 5000 wins.
Setup
Use the 106-card Mille Bornes pack. Deal six cards to each player and place the rest as a draw pile. Each player or team has two areas in front of them: a battle pile for hazards and remedies, and a speed pile for limits. Distance cards are laid out in a row so the total is easy to read.
How to play
On your turn draw a card and play one, or discard if you cannot play. You may only add distance while a green Roll card is showing and no hazard is blocking you. Hazards go on opponents, remedies clear your own, and the four safeties permanently immunise you against one hazard each.
Playing a safety in direct answer to the matching hazard, the moment it is played on you, is a coup fourré. Announce it, discard the hazard, take an extra turn and mark it on the sheet.
A hand ends when someone covers the full trip distance, or when the draw pile runs out and the last player has played.
Scoring
Both sides score, whether or not they finished:
- Distance driven: 1 point per kilometre, up to the trip length
- Each safety played or held revealed: 100 (4 safeties = 400)
- All four safeties: 300 extra
- Each coup fourré: 300 extra
Only the side that completes the trip adds these:
- Trip completed: 400
- Delayed action, meaning you finished after the draw pile had already run out: 300
- Safe trip, meaning you played no 200 km card all hand: 300
- Extension, meaning you called for 1000 km after reaching 700 and got there: 200
- Shut-out, meaning your opponents played no distance cards at all: 500
A worked example: a side drives the full 1000 km, holds two safeties, one of them a coup fourré, and finishes normally without any 200 km card. That is 1000 + 200 + 300 + 400 + 300 = 2200.
No side may play more than two 200 km cards in a single hand. If nobody completes the trip, each side scores only its kilometres and safety bonuses.
Ending the game
Deal fresh hands and keep adding to the running totals until a side reaches 5000 at the end of a hand. If both sides pass the target in the same hand, the higher total wins.
Common variations
Some groups play the extension rule at every player count, others drop it entirely. A common house rule caps a hand at 1000 km even in a two-player game. Playing 2v2 with four players is the most social version and is how the box recommends it.
Scoring at a glance
| Who wins | First to target |
|---|---|
| Played to | 5000 points by default |
| Score sheet | One number per player per round, with a running total |
| Typical round score | 0 – 1500 |
| Negative scores | Never — scores only go up |
| Worth knowing | One cell per side per hand, holding kilometres driven plus every bonus earned. A hand won cleanly is usually somewhere between 1000 and 1900. |
Mille Bornes — score sheet
House rules and settings
Every table plays Mille Bornes a little differently. These are the 9 rules groups argue about. Each one is a setting in the app — and changing it recalculates a match that is already in progress, which is the thing no other score keeper does.
Game ends: what are the options in Mille Bornes?
Whether you race to a cumulative total across several hands, or agree in advance how many hands you will play.
Default: When a side passes a target. Two options:
In the app: “Game ends”.
Play to: what is the default in Mille Bornes?
The cumulative score that ends the game. 5000 is the published figure; 3000 makes for a shorter session.
Default: 5000. Adjustable from 1000 to 10000 in steps of 500.
In the app: “Play to”.
Number of hands: what is the default in Mille Bornes?
If you are playing a fixed-length game, this is how many hands are dealt before totals are compared.
Default: 4. Adjustable from 1 to 20 in steps of 1.
In the app: “Number of hands”.
Trip length: what are the options in Mille Bornes?
How far you must drive to complete a hand. Two and three player games traditionally race to 700; four or more play the full 1000.
Default: 1000 km. Two options:
In the app: “Trip length”.
Allow extension: on or off in Mille Bornes?
On a 700 km trip the first side to arrive may instead push on to 1000 km, gambling the hand for an extra bonus.
Default: on.
In the app: “Allow extension”.
Coup fourré bonus: what is the default in Mille Bornes?
Awarded when you play a safety card the instant an opponent hits you with the matching hazard. Counted for each one, on top of the usual safety points.
Default: 300. Adjustable from 0 to 500 in steps of 50.
In the app: “Coup fourré bonus”.
Shut-out bonus: what is the default in Mille Bornes?
Awarded for completing the trip while your opponents never managed to play a single distance card.
Default: 500. Adjustable from 0 to 1000 in steps of 50.
In the app: “Shut-out bonus”.
Safe trip bonus: what is the default in Mille Bornes?
Awarded for completing the trip without ever playing a 200 km card, which is much harder than it sounds.
Default: 300. Adjustable from 0 to 500 in steps of 50.
In the app: “Safe trip bonus”.
Teams: what are the options in Mille Bornes?
With four or six players you can either race individually or pair up, sharing one hand of cards and one score between partners.
Default: Everyone for themselves. Three options:
In the app: “Teams”.
Variants of Mille Bornes
Short race
Play to 3000 rather than 5000. Two or three hands are usually enough to settle it.
No extension
Reaching the trip distance always ends the hand immediately, removing the gamble and shortening every deal.
Mille Bornes is also known as
Mille Miglia, Touring, Milestones. These are the same game — the rules and the score sheet above apply to all of them.
Keep score offline
The sheet above works in your browser. Cardzo for iPhone remembers your players, survives a closed tab, and works in a field with no signal.
Coming to the App Store.