Jaipur: A 2-player Set Collecting Delight
We trade goods and fine items in the 2-player game Jaipur
Jaipur Box
Published by: Space Cowboys Created by: Sébastien Pauchon
There are some nifty gems when it comes to two-player card games. Take gin rummy, an ancient card game by today’s standards that asks its participants to drop and pickup cards to make melds in order to win a hand. My grandma taught me that game at a young age. It was an instant hit with me. The satisfaction of racing against her to beat her to the meld, thinking if my choices of collecting certain suits, numbers and runs was the right path to victory, or just a fools errand leading me to dead ends.
She was ruthless. Never letting me get away with anything. If I dropped what she was looking for, without a second, she would swoop in to pick up her spoils. Win after win, she would crush me. Of course, I started to understand the concept of record keeping in my head.
Oh, she picked up the 7 of spades? Is it for her straight or for her 3-of-a-kind? I have the 5 of Spades, maybe I hold on to that.
Machinations. Intuition. Memory. All of those go together to increase your chances of winning. What at first I thought of as a race to pick up cards I needed, the nuance of obtaining information to keep cards from your opponent in order to suffocate their success elevated a relatively simple game to a higher degree of fun.
So too is Jaipur.
Jaipur Components
silver and gold
Like gin rummy, Jaipur is a set collection game. Players will be trading cards in order to make sets of suits, sets that they will then hope to trade in for numbered tokens worth different amount of points. More on those tokens later. There are six suits that players can create sets from: silk, leather, spices, rubies, silver and gold.
The Seven Cards In Jaipur
At this point you might be thinking, how do players trade with each other, and why would they bother helping their rival? Well, in a way, players don’t interact with each other at all, in fact they use a kind of intermediate mechanism: the market.
This market is where both players will take and put back suited cards to make their personal sets. The market is central to the trading system and it has a few constants that makes players be more involved in what and how they trade cards with it. For starters, the central deck has five cards—and always five cards—that players will interact with. If a player only takes one card, the market is replenished by the draw deck. If a player needs two cards or more from the market, they must in turn put back the same amount to keep the market full. This little rule creates a few conundrums for the player trading multiple cards. Depending on what’s in the market, you could be dropping multiple cards of a suit that your opponent could be combining to make a larger set. Drop three leather cards onto the market and you could be giving them a five card set. How much you trade on the market can be extremely beneficial to your opponent regardless if you get what you want.
With six suits, the chances of making sets are always there. I like this limited suit amount. It makes gameplay quicker and less subject to card churn. You will always get something from the market, whether to pivot to a new set or to complete one you’ve been nursing for a few turns.
You could even get camels to pad your herd! Camels you say?
The Camels
the camel that broke the straw’s back
By far the most interesting aspect of the game are those camels. Wait, you didn’t know there were camels? There are, and they are magnificent. Camels are an extension of your hand allowing you to trade more cards from the central pile than you normally would. You don’t hold the camels in your hand, instead you place them face up in front of you. Jaipur only allows for a maximum of seven cards in your hand so at points in the game your hand can feel boxed in, or in other cases bereft of cards completely. At times like these, camels come to the rescue, allowing you to swap whatever card you want with cards from your hand, camels or any combination of both.
Gathering camels can be beneficial for future trades, specially when trying to get the rare and valuable gold, silver and ruby cards. These cards are worth infinitely more than the spice, leather and silk goods, and come in lesser quantities in the deck. Picking them up can be outright game shifting, swinging the lead one way or the other. This does create a meta of sorts within the game. Fine goods can define the game rather quickly if one person obtains two or three sets of these. It can also create tunnel vision as one can concentrate on only getting them while their opponent cleans up on other less lucrative tokens. The folly is there for one to lose perspective of the overall state of the game.
After all, if you can’t get tokens, you ain’t going nowhere.
money, money, money, money…mooooney!
Tokens. After trading, deliberating if you should pick up those four leather cards from the market, or swooping in to claim all the camels…the end game happens when tokens have been collected. To be more accurate, it’s when three of the stacks of goods tokens have been exhausted from play.
The Tokens of Jaipur
These tokens have different point nominations. Leather goods are plentiful, but lack the point heft to win you a game. The ruby tokens, on the other hand, are full of points, but have only 5 tokens in all—as do the golds and silvers. There is a clear dichotomy on the economy of tokens. While the silks, leathers and spices do have some modest gains to be extracted from, the real density of points lie in those other, shinny chips.
To make things more interesting, though, there are bonus tokens only available to players if they make sets of three, four or five. Each higher set receives a bonus token of equal value designation. A set of three leathers will get a bonus three set token along their normal leather tokens, and so on. These bonus tokens obviously accentuate the state of trading, changing the path of winning from collecting just the expensive goods, to maybe also collecting the more plentiful cheaper goods to get big points from these specialty bonus tokens. Getting a five tier bonus token from the discarded spice cards from your opponent is just as viable, and satisfying, way to create points.
How and when you trade then becomes a memory game of sorts, and also adds a “push your luck” element. How much do you wait to get bigger sets before your opponent picks up the more valuable tokens? Sitting on three golds in your hand waiting on a fourth to show up only negates other opportunities to gain other cards on the market. Do you get the sure points of two tokens, but miss the opportunity for those bonus points? What cards is your opponent holding onto that could affect your chances of getting any meaningful points? Did they pick up that silver card two turns ago?
The mental gymnastics in this game can be interesting. And everything can change when new cards are introduced to the market. A new dilemma each turn.
the spice of life
I love Jaipur for it’s simplicity, yet tactical consideration when trading into the central market. More often than not, trading cards into that market can become a perilous activity, pushing your mind to think of what has been picked up before and what, eventually, can give your opponent the edge in picking up a big stack of tokens. The camels add that extra bit of complexity to elevate the gameplay with every turn.
It’s a race, but a race that you must consider with every card that comes to the market. When you think it’s an easy decision to let go of a couple of cards, those cards can be the linchpin of your opponents’ trading pattern. The game doesn’t last too long either, playing a best-of-three within 30 to 45 minutes.
The visuals are a treat (check out the detail in the silver cards, just amazing) and the box and insert are made of sturdy material, and hold everything in a tight, neat package. The tokens themselves are thick stock, and, even though they are cardboard, feel good in the hand.
In all, if you’re new to gaming or want to introduce someone to the modern board game scene, Jaipur is a great place to start.
Highly recommended.
For your Consideration
+ Fast paced and easy to learn
+ Satisfying game play with meaningful decisions to make
+ Component quality is top notch
+ Art work is engaging and beautiful
— Insert does not allow for sleeved cards
