You perform as merchants. You are trying to catch the market with a mixture of goods. In a real market, engulfing it with produce reduces the price. In Jaipur, the first goods of a supplied type you sell are worth more points than the following ones. Simple.
Except, in another trademark of a great game, the approach is anything but easy. You’ll be balancing various stock lines on restricted storage space. After the Pink city, Jaipur in north India, camel trains to manage and colourful art to admire.
Jaipur Game: Price And Who It’s For
This small box contains cards and many cardboard counters, so it won’t crack the bank to buy. Rates are around £14/$20 for a copy of the latest edition. If you need an even smaller financial and physical footprint, there’s a magnificent app variant available for mobiles.
One limitation is that this is for two players only. And as it’s a competitive game with a part of luck, you rightly pick someone who won’t mind losing and you won’t mind losing to as a contestant. At the same time, younger kids might get the laws. The 12+ age recommended on the box is about reasonable. For adults, it’s just a thing of whether someone is too delicate a loser to change the cards and run over or not!
With just a few scant pages of rules to learn, it’s well suited for beginners or casual players. Still, there’s easily enough strategy and replayability here to appeal to more hardcore board game fans, too, especially when you consider the playtime of around half an hour in total.
Jaipur Game: How It Plays
Jaipur is all about fighting priorities and good timing. In your turn, you can either pick up cards from a face-up selection in the middle of the table. It is shared between both players. You can trade cards from your hand to exchange them for points. That’s it. One of the other, then your opponent goes, and so on. You’d never believe what a wealth of judgments that simple setup could cover.
All that strategy is formed with two simple tools. First, you understand a secret, arbitrary bonus for selling three or more assets of the same kind at once. So it gives to be reliable and stockpile more cards of the identical type to trade at once if you can. Next, however, you can’t have more than seven goods in your help at once. So you’re continuing to have to make hard choices about what you collect. Mercifully, camel cards don’t score against your hand limit, so you can create them up individually and keep them for good shenanigans in the future, which we’ll describe in a moment.
All the goods are worth differing amounts, from precious diamonds to cheap leather, and more valuable goods are more expensive. If you get a card from the store in the middle, you’re also getting a risk: when its replacement gets moved, it could be a high-value card for your contestant to grab.
In the end, something has to provide, and you’ll want to sell. Repeat, timing is everything because the earlier you sell, the more you get for your goods. Sometimes it’s sufficient to cash in a single card early on to grab the points, seldom not. It all depends on whatever your opponent is dealing and collecting, and it pays to watch them like a hawk. Jaipur is very much a skill-based game.
You can’t purchase or sell camels. Only utilise them for this swap, but they’re comfortable to get. If you get one from the market, you get to take all the camels currently there, providing you with a vast collection of cards to earn swaps with later. But beware, because this also indicates your opponent will get an extra-rich range of new cars to pick from. There’s also a reward at the end for whoever has the most camels moved in front of them.
Determining the right time to buy, sell, and swap is core to doing great. It can, nevertheless, lead to cagey ways of play where opponents are selling single cards or hold swapping to prevent sharing a new card for their opponent, which can frustrate them. But this is;
a) a minor problem when a game only needs about 10 minutes,
b) not how everyone will want to play anyway. The rules say you’re assumed to play best of three, but if you’re strained for time, a one-off is still lots of fun.
You play as two players fighting head to head. It’s full of synergy and excitement. Flipping the following stock you know your opponent is collecting off the top of the deck is an absolute go-to moment. So is getting out the extra diamond you’ve been anticipating for has been in your foe’s hand from the start of the game. Each game seems a bit like a swordsmanship match as you win and lose ground. Until the ultimate points tally, stay there to take those secret bonus chips.
Jaipur Game: Judgment
Jaipur is a contemporary classic that allows you many possibilities from only a few rules, and as such, it has broad appeal. The principal stalling point is that it’s two-player only, not something you can lash out to want a dinner party or a family. But if that’s what you want right now, it’s approximately perfect.
Some board gamers like to have a lot of crunch to their games, either in strategic depth or simulation. It’s a bit outspoken for either of the more hardcore grounds. But just about everyone other will have a considerable time.
