Blizzard of 77

I discovered the "Blizzard of 77 Travel Game" through eBay searches for other games.  I don't remember what I was looking for, but it came up as a suggestion and looked like a lot of fun.  Having grown up in upstate New York myself, we lived through some crazy snowstorms as a kid, before the family moved to Long Island, so it was a fun topic.  I was able to reconstruct the board in my notebook of game design history, but there's no substitute for getting the real thing.  What you can't easily reconstruct from images or other people's game stories are the decks of event cards.  Not to mention the feel of the nice thick game board.  So, I found a near-mint copy listed for about $30.  With shipping, it was about the cost of a mid-range new board game.

You start out on the Sunny Side of the board.  The goal is to get to all five locations and collect a card from each one, then get home for the win.  So here we are on the Sunny Side...

When you land on a space that says Weather Card, draw a weather card, and do what it says.  These are just the usual minor setbacks for a board game: move here or there, lost a turn.  But as you see in the photo, there is a special card (more than one of them in the deck, by the way) that says Blizzard Strikes!  At that point, you flip over the board to the Blizzard Side:

Here, almost every space is some kind of obstacle.  The safest spaces are the ones where you can make a U-Turn or where the only penalty is moving half speed.  The rest are move back, lose a turn, lose TWO turns, go to JAIL, go to the gas station, and of course, Blizzard Cards.  The Blizzard cards have even more extreme results, but they are not always bad -- sometimes they will send you to a space you need to get to, or flat out give you a Food card.  You have to navigate all the setbacks and frustrations, with plenty of laughs along the way.  It never felt so good to actually make it to the Hardware Store.

In the next photo, Anne (the red car) completed all objectives and just has to get Home to win (see the finger pointing) ;-)  and there's my black car flipped over, going nowhere on a Lose Two Turns space.

She grew up in Minnesota, so snow storm mayhem was memorable for both of us.  There are some uncommonly historical notes on some of the cards, like this being the first time in history that the U.S. government declared a state of emergency for a snow-related disaster.

The rules are not perfect, so some interpolations are needed.  Like when you lose a turn or two.  We ended up turning our cars on their sides for lose one turn, and upside down for lose two turns.  It made an appropriate visual way to track those actions.  And, after an accident, it seemed like you should be able to choose any direction when you start moving again.  Remembering which way you were going after the skids, accidents and mishaps was just a pain.  Though we did keep the car facing the same direction when blown back four spaces, which was pretty hilarious, and that's four spaces in a straight line, no going around corners just because that was how you got there.  Even funnier when you blow back four spaces onto a space that says "Driving Ban - Go To Jail".  Whee.

For two players, we got so few weather cards on the sunny side, that we decided you have to draw a weather card even if you pass over a weather card space, not just when you land on one.  Without that rule, we had 7 of the 10 objectives done before the storm even hit.  With that rule, four.  It felt like the right balance, getting about halfway before flipped to the storm side.  We kept forgetting the rule of getting a free turn if you roll doubles, but on the storm side you only roll one die anyway, so it wasn't that important.

This was a fun game to explore.  A simple roll and move game, but with so many obstacles and turn-abouts, it is well worth another session some day.