Jaipur

 

Jaipur
Company: Gameworks; Type: Eurostyle; Players: 2; Time: 30 minutes; Genre: Rummy; Rating: 💥💥💥💥💥 We love it!

One of the things I look for in board games is whether they can effectively scale down to two players. A lot of the time it's my wife and me. So if a game is going to get played much, it needs to scale down accordingly.

Jaipur, by contrast, is a pure two-person game. The theme is that you are a merchant and are hoping to earn your way to becoming the Maharaja's personal factotum. You do this in the game by winning at least two of three rounds of trading.

This is a rummy-style game in which you draft cards from the tableau, match them with cards in your hand and then meld / play them to the board as sets to earn points.

There are six types of cards to match, each of which is a commodity: diamonds, gold, silver, cloth, and leather. There are also camels, which act as null cards (much like a black three in Canasta). The tableau is five cards -- starting out with three camels and two random commodities.

On any given turn, you can take one of the following actions:

Take an individual good: Take the card, deal another to the tableau from the deck

Take several goods: Pick up any two commodity cards from the tableau. Replace them with the same number of either commodity or camels.

Take all the camels: Take all the camel cards, replace them with an equal number of cards dealt to the tableau from the deck.

Turn in sets of cards: Turn in sets of matching cards, except for camels. For each item in a set, draw the next token on top of the stack for the same commodity. If you trade in sets of three, four, or five items, draw a mystery token from the stack denoted for the same-size set.

Now for some wrinkles. First of all the tokens in most stacks reduce in value as you draw down that stack. The highest value commodities (diamonds, gold and silver) require at least two tokens to cash in. The lower value commodities (cloth, spices and leather) don't. And for the record, all silver tokens are worth five.

When your third commodity stack gets depleted, the round ends and you score it. Whoever has most camels, gets the most camels victory token. Add up all the values, and whoever has most points wins that round.

It is a simple game, but with some nuance. First, the game has a high degree of variance in play in terms of initial conditions and how they shape your strategy in the game. Do you hold out for high-value trades? Or do you churn through lower-value ones to accumulate points quickly to end the round early?

Also, nota bene that there is no draw directly into your hand. Fresh cards come out only as a result of your drafting from the tableau. There develops a rhythm to the choices being made, as you are trying to get your stuff done, but also trying to present your opponent with dilemmas to solve in their game. Remarkably, no game feels the same. (Much the same way as I feel about Euchre.)

As a side note, Neil Christiansen introduced this one to me at a Gen Con once, and I was immediately sold on it!

(Neil Christiansen introduced this one to me at Gen Con once. I was immediately sold on it!)

(Neil Christiansen introduced this one to me at Gen Con once. I was immediately sold on it!)