Overview of Jaipur

Imagine the scene: you are a successful trader in the bustling Indian city of Jaipur. Things went well until one day a competing retailer arrived in the city, which now threatens your dominance over local trade.

Luckily you have a secret weapon up your sleeve.

Send to the camels !

Check out the GameCows Jaipur Board Game Review below.

Jaipur

SUBTLE TRADING GAME: In Jaipur, players take on the role of two ...
STRATEGIC GAME: Collect and exchange goods in the market, then sell ...
TWO PLAYERS COMPETITIVE GAME: Sell your opponent to win ...

A brief overview of Jaipur

Jaipur is a two-player card game in which players compete against each other and call them the personal trader of the Maharaja.

Opponents are vying to become the richest trader in the competition of the best of the three. You do this by collecting sets of goods on cards from the common market and then trading them for rupees. The more you have, the more you can earn. But don’t linger too long because you might miss your chance.

It's a game of risk and reward ... and trying to smash your opponent with camels. At the end of three rounds, someone proved that Gordon Gecko is the Indian commodity market.

Unpacking Jaipur

The Jaipur box is small, and there is also a list of components you get there:

55 cash cards
- 6 diamonds
- 6 gold
- 6 silver
- 8 cloth
- 8 spices
- 10 leather (that's right, the game is actually leather)
- 11 camels
38 commodity tokens
1 camel token
18 bonus tokens
3 seals of excellence

For a budget game , Jaipur understandably didn’t go over the top with bells and whistles (I counted, but there’s not a single bell or whistle in the whole box). But what you get works perfectly well.

I would have liked the artwork on the cards to come to life a bit more, as they certainly don’t radiate personality. But warm illustrations, colors and design evoke the theme well.

Similarly, chips are spectacular and will get a little ugly over time, especially if you buy this as a travel game . But they do their job and again, it’s hard to complain about the price.

How to play Jaipur

The goal of the game

Your goal is to secure the role of a personal trader of the Maharaja by becoming the richest trader among them. To do this, exchange and sell diamonds, gold, silver, cloth, spices and leather in exchange for rupees. The more cards you have goods, the more rupees you will get.

Jaipur is the best of the three games. At the end of each round, whoever is richest gets the seal of excellence. The first to receive two seals of excellence wins.

Setup

To start, take three camel cards and place them in the middle face up. Then shuffle all the remaining cards and deal five to both players. Place the dissatisfaction cards in the middle as a drag pile, take two from the top and place them next to the camels. These five cards are the market.

Then, if you have any camels in your hands, load them in front of you to assemble your herd.

For each type of goods, there are tokens that have different values. Make a pile of each individual good species and stack them in descending order of value.

You are now ready to drive and / or trade!

They take turns

You can choose one of two routes on your route.

Take the goods

This is your chance to increase stocks of goods or camels. There are three options:

Take more goods: swap as many cards in your hand as you want - goods or camels - with cards on the market.
Take one good one: take one market card and replace it with a card from the deck.
Take all the camels: pick up all the camels in the market and put them in your herd.

Note, you cannot have more than seven cards in your hand (no camels) at the end of the turn. There must always be five cards on the market.

Sell goods

Your second option is to sell the goods in hand. The goods are sold in sets in exchange for the corresponding chip type - the more cards of the same type you have, the more chips you will get in return.

When exchanging between one and two cards, you only get the appropriate number of chips. However, if you sell three or more of the same cards, you will also receive a bonus token.

There are three, four and five bonus chips. Each is assigned a random value that you will not know until you take it. A three-card bonus token can be worth between one and three rupees; a four-card bonus token can be worth between four and six rupees; a five-card bonus token can be worth between seven and ten.

Round end and scoring

The round ends immediately if three types of commodity tokens are no longer available or when the lottery lot runs out.

Then comes the scoring. To do this, add up all the tokens of goods you have collected. Diamond tokens will bring you more rupees than gold, gold more than silver, and so on. Also, the player with the largest herd of camels receives five bonus rupees.

Whoever has the most rupees wins the medal of excellence and the next round can begin. If someone collects two seals of excellence, they win!

Your first Jaipur game

Jaipur is a wonderfully simple game to understand. However, before your first game, the role that camels play may not be obvious. Or at least how they can be used effectively.

Camels, however, will be your secret weapon in guarding the keys of the Maharaja’s personal merchant’s office. They are useful because you can trade them for any commodity in the market and the opponent cannot sell them. This is a way to increase your hand without losing the goods card.

In addition to trading camels to strengthen your arm, camels also allow you to manipulate the market to reduce the chance of your opponent making any high points. For example, if you think that some cards with a high number of deck points will come out of the window , it probably pays to fill the market with camels. That means they may have no choice but to take them all, and you’ll get a free reign over what comes off the deck after.

When it comes to rules, you can forget that good-selling dealerships (diamonds, gold, and silver) can only be sold if you exchange at least two. For tickets with a lower number of points, you can only sell what you want.

Advantages disadvantages

Advantages:

A simple and fast game of risk and reward
Great for two players
The perfect travel game

Weaknesses:

It only works with two
Limited interaction

Jaipur doesn’t like to complicate things too much. This is a simple, easy card game that will end in about 20 minutes. And if that’s all you’re looking for, don’t look for it completely anymore. You will try to find another quick and easy player who is so much fun. It has a great pace, and the element of rewarding with risks makes it incredibly tense and exciting.

If you’re still on the fence, you can even check out the digital version on Steam before committing to the real thing.

Decision making

There is a surprising amount of strategy and decision making for such a simple game. For example, commodity tokens were spiced simply by reducing their value. This does not add extra weight to the policy , while encouraging players to compete for chips with more points. Then on the other hand you also have to consider holding cards to try to get a bigger set, which gives you a higher bonus. Tense and important decisions have to be made and it is because of these risks that it is so much fun to play.

Camels

But camels are the strategy that is really coming. And a masterful game of these will be what will change things. Luck also plays a big role in the game - what comes off the deck and the bonus tokens you choose is entirely up to you. However, this is not all and the end of all. In the end, who scores the most points depends on who plays well.

Duel

The fact that the game is intended exclusively for two players limits its usefulness to a larger family or gaming group . But for a travel game, it sticks nice and small and easily fills in a few gaps.

As far as gaming is concerned, any easy card game will struggle to be available to everyone. Although it generally worked without a hitch, I found that sometimes things got a little stuck because both players don’t want to pick up and reveal other cards, which can be a bit tiring.

What’s more, Jaipur is likely to repeat itself over time if played extensively at each session. This is a bit exaggerated due to the fact that there is basically no direct interaction between the players as everything goes through the market. So if you prefer a more aggressive style of play, this may not completely hit those buttons.

TL; DR

For an easy and simple card game, Jaipur is a surprising and intense experience. Buying and selling goods in the common market is your goal to become the richest trader in the country.

This is a game of pushing your luck. Given its simplicity and speed, things can get incredibly tight.

This is one of the most enjoyable two-player games you are likely to find, especially because of the price and complexity.

Conclusion: a verdict?

Jaipur is a really impressive and enjoyable two-player game that you’ll probably need less than half an hour to pull over and over again.

It has a wonderful charm with its artwork and simple gameplay, and the level of strategy it manages to pack will continue to make it interesting enough as a solid, lightweight filler for the time being.

Above all, it’s really exciting. The risks you will take are great, and the benefits are much greater. And when your patience finally pays off with the deposit of a large number and a top-notch bonus token, it can be quite an adrenaline rush.

Besides, who doesn’t love a good camel?

Jaipur