Mille Bornes is listed in the GAMES Magazine Hall of Fame.

The game was created in 1954 by Frenchman Edmond Dujardin, and was quite similar to the earlier American automotive card game Touring. A key innovation was the addition of the coup-fourré, whereby bonus points are earned by holding back a safety card (such as the puncture-proof tire) until an opponent plays the corresponding hazard card (in this case, the flat tire).

Some Mille Bornes decks are printed in both English and French. The Spanish version Mil Hitos, distributed by Heraclio Fournier, was very popular in Spain during the 1970s.[citation needed] In the Netherlands there is a variant of this game, Stap op, which deals with cycling instead of driving.[citation needed] The hazards and distances are different, but the mechanics of the game are exactly the same.

The premise of Mille Bornes is that the players are in a road race. Each race—or hand—is usually 700 miles (or kilometers) long, but the first player to complete that distance exactly has the option to declare an extension in which case the race becomes 1,000 miles. (In the four-player version, the target distance is 1,000 miles from the start.) The object of the game is to reach 5,000 points, which normally takes several hands.

Mille Bornes is played with a special deck of cards. There are hazard, remedy, safety, and distance cards. Each hazard is corrected by a corresponding remedy, and is actually prevented from happening in the first place by a corresponding safety. The target distance is reached by playing distance cards.

Also included in the deck are nonplayable cards that list the playable cards and summarize the scoring. In some decks, some of these are printed entirely in French.

As mentioned above, there are Hazards, Remedies, Safeties and Distances cards.

The Hazards are:

There are three each of Accident, Out of Gas and Flat Tire in a standard game, there are 5 Stops in a standard game and there are 4 Speed Limits in a standard game.

The Remedies are: