Back quite a few years ago when I first moved to Brisbane, I used to go to a games night at the Kookaburra Cafe. The main host and I became good friends, and one day he sat down with me excited to show me a two-player game called Jaipur. I was intrigued, and then very quickly hooked.
Jaipur has a simple premise – collect and sell sets of goods to earn the most money. The round ends when three rows of rewards for goods are claimed, and you play the best of three rounds. There are some other things for scoring, like selling sets of three, four or five products gives a bonus. Selling early gives you a points boost, but these bonuses waiting for a higher set can swing the game.
Between the two players is a row of five cards, and you have three possible actions. Take, where you simply take a good into your hand. Trade, where you switch at least two cards in the centre market with the same number from your hand, and sell. Sell is where you trade your goods for points. There isn’t much to get your head around in Jaipur.
There are a few items that you can trade, including camels. The player with the most camels at the end of the round gets a five-point bonus. During the game though, camels are a great item to trade with. Camels do not count towards your 7-card hand size limit and can allow you to capitalise on a dream draw.
I introduce Jaipur to Rabbit and unfortunately botched the initial rules explanation. She did make the comment that Jaipur needs more patience to play than she had at the end of our game day. I never thought of Jaipur this way. A little bit of card counting, risk/reward for gaining or selling items at the right time, but not ‘patience’.
Either way, it was really fun to play Jaipur as it had been far too long. Maybe I can talk Tim into a game or two once work settles back down…
