Game Reviews, Strategy Articles, and More

Foreword

Jaipur is an ingeniously streamlined two-player trading game. The rules are simple, each turn is quick, rounds are short, and strategic concepts flow from it naturally while playing. I’ll explain that last one in more detail later, but I love this game because it is much deeper than I expected.

How to Play

Goal

Strategically collect and sell 6 different goods (and camels) in order to make the most money.

Turn Order

On each turn you can either take cards or sell cards.

• Take Cards

Take 1 face-up good from the central 5 and put it in your hand. (You cannot have more than 7 cards in your hand at once, camels do not count.) Replace it with the top card from the deck.

|OR|

Take all face-up camels from the central 5 and place them in front of you face up. Replace them with the top card(s) from the deck.

|OR|

Exchange any number of cards from the central 5 with camels in front of you and/or cards from your hand. Be careful that your hand size does not exceed 7 after exchanging.

• Sell Cards

Instead of taking cards, you can sell up to 5 cards of the same good at once. For each card you sell, you would take 1 goods-token of the respective type. (The first goods-tokens for each good are worth more then the later goods-tokens, except for silver.)

While cloth, leather, and spices can be sold in quantities of 1 or more, diamonds, silver, and gold must be sold in quantities of 2 or more.

In addition, if you sell 3 goods at once, you would get the top 3-goods bonus-token (worth between 1-3 points). If you sell 4 at once, you would get the top 4-goods bonus-token (worth between 4-6 points). Sell 5 or more and you get top 5-goods bonus-token (worth between 8-10 points).

Round End/Game End

The round ends when either:

• The draw pile runs out of cards while refilling the central 5.
• 3 separate piles of goods-tokens are depleted.

At the end of the round, the player with the most camels left over gets a 5-point bonus-token. Both players add their points, and the player with the most points wins the round.

Best 2 out of 3 rounds determines the winner of the game. If neither player has 2 wins, reset the game and play again.

Conclusion

I love this game because it is so simple and deceptively clever. The general premise is literally just get cards and sell cards, and it is very easy to teach. Even in a player’s first game, they will be able to make solid plays and high-quantity sales. The more you play the game though, the more you realize how you can manipulate your acquisitions, sales, and camels to best utilize the board.

I am not going to go into too much detail here because I plan on writing a strategy article about Jaipur at some point, and I do not want to scare people off. It really is easy to learn and fun to play immediately, but there is interesting strategy to learn as well. For those of you interested, a couple questions to keep in mind while playing are included below.

Foreword

This is just a good, quick, simple, dice-rolling game that I recommend. The dice-rolling is similar to Yahtzee, but each turn you get something good (just maybe not exactly what you wanted).

How to Play

Components

There are 3 main components that each player will use: dice, pegboard, and score card/reference sheet.

• The dice in this game have 6 unique sides:
  3 food (feeding cities),
  3 workers (building cities/monuments),
  2 food or 2 workders (you choose which to use),
  7 coins (used to buy developments but lost at end of turn),
  1 good (used to buy developments but can be saved for later turns),
  2 goods and 1 skull (2 goods and part of a disaster, cannot be re-rolled).
• The peg board tracks goods and food leftover from previous turns.
• The score card/reference sheet tracks your completed cities, developments, monuments, disasters, and has remainders on how to play the game.

Turn Order

• Roll Dice

Roll 1 die for each completed city you control (you start with 3). Set aside any dice with a face-up skull. You may then re-roll the remaining dice. After this re-roll, set aside any dice with a face-up skull on them, and then you may re-roll the rest of the dice one more time. If you chose not to re-roll a die the first time, you may re-roll it the second time.

• Collect Goods and Food

For each good (dice showing a skull give 2 goods), increase a peg on your board by 1 starting at the bottom. *See Example and Picture below*
For each food on your dice, increase the green food track on your peg board by 1.

• Feed Cities and Resolve Disasters

For each completed city you have, decrease your green food track by 1. Then, for each point you can’t decrease it, mark 1 spot in the disasters section of the score card. If you rolled 2 or more skulls, reference the right side of the score sheet to see if you lose any points and mark that many spaces in the disasters section.

• Build Cities and/or Monuments

For each worker you rolled, you can mark an empty box in either a city or a monument. If you mark all the spots in a city, you complete it and will roll one more die per turn. Marking all the spots in a monument completes it. If you were the first player to do it you would score the left point value, everyone else that completes it in the future scores the right value.

• May Buy a Development

Coins and goods can be used to buy a development. Coins are worth 7 a piece at the start of the game (12 with Coinage). Goods can be sold in a lump for the bonus on the beg board. If you use any of the 5 resources you must use all of that resource. Only 1 development may be bought each turn, and unused coins can’t be saved for next turn.

• Discard Goods in Excess of 6

All of your pegs may only be over a combined total of 6 places at the end of your turn (unless you have the Caravans development). You must move pegs to the left until they do not exceed 6 total.

• Pass the Dice to the Next player

Game End

The end of the game is triggered when

A) a player buys their 5th development,
B) at the end of a player’s turn, every monument has been built at least once this game.

In this game everyone gets the same number of turns. So if player 1 went first and player 2 achieved one of the above game end triggers, players 3 and 4 would still take their turn.

Conclusion

This is a nice quick game I break out when we don’t know what we want to play. The rules aren’t too complicated, and the score card/reference card is spectacularly well-designed. Everything fits compactly onto it, but it doesn’t feel cramped or like anything important was left out. I really appreciate a good reference sheet, and this game delivers.

The dice-rolling works particularly well in this game because even if you get skulls, you still get 2 resources per skull. You might even get Pestilence making your opponents lose points instead.

Developments are where this game gets the rest of its variety. There are a good number of choices at different prices, so you can take your civilization building in different ways. My only complaint with the game is that almost all of the games I have played, the game ended when someone got their 5th development. I think maybe only 1 game I played all of the monuments were built. The 5 development game end feels a bit rushed to me, but it does keep the length solid.

At their website http://www.rollthroughtheages.com/#downloads there is a Late Bronze Age variant that could address this problem. I only just came across it while I was verifying that the extra score sheets can be found on there. As you can tell, I do not expect you to need extra sheets anytime in the near future.

In addition, the website reminded me that there is a trading variant that lets players trade goods and food however they want on their turn. I have not used that variant so I can’t speak to it, but I enjoy the game without it.

All in all, I enjoy the game. I’m always happy to play it. I would never schedule an event just to play this game, but I basically always bring it with me.