Jaipur Review

Game - Jaipur

Designer: Sébastien Pauchon

Publisher: GameWorks

Artist: Alexandre Roche

Player Count: 2

Runtime: 30 minutes



Welcome to the Pink City, the beautiful, picturesque, Jaipur, forming part of the Golden Triangle tourist circuit of India. It is a superb spot to stop, spend a while and see the sites, perhaps enjoy one of the busy markets an treat yourself to some fine jewellery, gemstones, gorgeous, mouth-water cuisine and fine artisan textiles...I could go on rewording the Wikipedia entry for Jaipur, but no doubt I’ll just end up embarrassing myself to anyone who actually has a clue. But we’re not here to highlight my geographical ignorance, no, I’m here to write a review of the two-player tabletop game Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon and published by GameWorks. And you, of course, are here to read about it.



Jaipur is a two player only game about trading a variety of goods ranging from gold and silver finery to leather hides. It has a neat little economic engine at its core which makes this game utterly worthy of your attention if you haven’t enjoyed this light, quick game before. Mechanically this game is extremely simple, as the mechanics aren’t what makes this game interesting, no, it’s the simple abstraction of economics down to its core that makes this game as good as it is.

For a start, there is no money in this game, it is about trading, NOT buying as so many other “trading” games are. You have your hand of goods, and your opponent has theirs, these are your wares, with which you can do two things, first you can sell them off and get them out of your hand, or second, you can trade them at the market for other goods.

 



 

At the market every good is equal to another, so a leather hide is “worth” the same amount as a golden vase, which may seem odd, but bear with me here. You can trade any number and any type of cards in hand at the market to get just one type in return. So you could trade your gold, silks and a camel away for some leather hides. Why would you do this? Because of the other action, you can take next turn. With the three leather you just picked up and the two you already had in hand you can now sell all five of them, which is good. In fact, it’s very good.

Jaipur has this excellent representation of “the market” in the form of some little tokens. During the setup of the game, you’ll separate all the different types out and stack them in numerical order, with the highest on top. This is the demand for the goods, when you sell some spices you’ll take a number of tokens. If you are the first to sell spices you’ll earn more victory points than if you wait until later - when the market is saturated and everyone is eating really spicy food. Some things like gold and silver don’t lose their value as quickly as other goods, leather losing it the fastest.



So now you’re thinking, “Ok, sell quickly! easy, that doesn’t sound that interesting.”

Hold your camels, there’s more.

Remember our hand of five leather from earlier, when you said I was mad for trading away the gold? Well, now I’m going to sell it. Not only do I pick up the top five Leather tokens and bag myself some points, but because I sold five, and this demonstrates some real business savvy I also pick up a bonus token for selling so many. A bonus to the tune of ten. Ruby, Gold and Silver can only ever be sold if you have at least two, so although one gold plate is good, you can’t do anything with it. Two is better, but you won’t get any bonuses for two, you need more. In Jaipur, you always need more.

It is with these little tokens, Jaipur effortlessly manages to represent Demand and the economy of scale. It is simply more efficient to sell more of one good at one time and selling it when no one else is also making it extremely profitable, which all makes perfect sense.



Now let's talk about camels, as they will form a key part of any game of Jaipur. Camels are a commodity like any other, but unlike all the other goods, they don’t go into your hand, instead, they sit on the table in front of you, in a stable, if you will. This makes them act a little like a “cash reserve”, whenever you take camels from the market row, you must take all of them - camel traders are ruthless like that I’ve heard. But these ungulates are a double-edged sword, yes you get a lot of trading power, but you are also revealing lots of new goods to your opponent to snap up. Most interestingly though is that with a hand limit of seven, the camels also act as a “greed modifier”, by which I mean they give you the sense of having “too much cash burning in your pocket”, they force you to start making tough, less efficient choices based purely upon a player’s desire for more.

Jaipur is played over a best-of-three-rounds, each round lasting about ten minutes, with the winner of each earning a Seal of Excellence from the Maharaja. To win these Seals and be proclaimed the greatest Merchant in all of India you’ll need to balance and mitigate your risks. In Jaipur there are always options, focusing solely on trading only in the most expensive items may seem like a good idea but you’ll quickly become unstuck. The temptation to push your luck, see another flop of cards in the market row, to try and capture that elusive fifth card is a tough one to beat, but sooner or later the game and your opponent will coax and force you to behave below what you really want, because it offers up such an attractive alternative, even if it is leather hides.



There are a couple of other things that are note worth when talking about this game, more in reference to your game shelf rather than the game itself.

1. The insert is brilliant. Perfectly functional and pretty.

2. It is very transportable. It's an ideal travel/holiday game. A deck of cards and a bunch of tokens makes this very easy to travel with.

3. Footprint and Brevity: It doesn’t take up a lot of space at all, and its short runtime makes it a great game to fill the gaps in a game night, or to play on your lunch break.



Jaipur is a really, really good game, and is absolutely worth checking out if you play a lot of two-player games, or you want a good short game to play to plug those game-shaped gaps in your life. What Jaipur isn’t, however; is juicy. You’ll walk away from a game thinking, “That was nice.”, and sure you’d happily play it again, but it may not be the first game you reach for, it doesn’t leave you with a story, or leave you mulling over the decisions you made in the game- but it’s not meant to either. Jaipur is an Aperitif, it is light, pretty and friendly. Yes, it is very enjoyable, it whets the cardboard appetite wonderfully for games with deeper and more meaningful decisions and consequence.

Disclaimer:  This review was based on a full priced retail edition paid for out of my own money from my own pocket.

 

Review: Ominoes

Ominoes.  A game for Pharaohs, for Rulers and Sovereigns all.  A game for dice chuckers, a game for those that love and hate Chance in equal measure.  For those that want a generous sprinkling of strategy over their polyhedrons in the morning. And for those that just want a quick tabletop hit, but don’t have time for the chits that comes with those bigger box games.  

A Confession:

Now, while writing this I’ve spent a truly inordinate amount of time trying to concoct a silly story about how this game was played by ancient Egyptians 4,000 years ago.  I also spent far too long looking for hieroglyphs of people playing a board game, of ancient looking dice and so on.  All this for the simple aim of duping you, dear reader, into believing, even for a moment that Ominoes is really a modern re-skin of an ancient game such as Chess, Go, or the Royal Game of Ur.  But, to do this would have been to cheapen the accomplishment of the designer, Andrew Harman.  It also wouldn’t have been particularly funny.  Why would I want to do this?  Simple: Ominoes is startlingly simply to play that it feels like it belongs alongside those ancient games I mentioned before.  It’s hard to believe that this game didn’t exist before Andrew and YAY Games brought it into the world.  It has an almost ageless quality to it.

A dry description of this game may include words such as abstract, area-control, and pattern-recognition and dice.  My description would only involve three words. Simple. Elegant. Fun.

I was reminded of the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

And there is nothing in this game, nothing, that doesn’t need to be there.  It is incredibly lean, and from this stripped back stance the game gains, no, it earns its elegance.  And it does so in spades.

How to roll dice:

So, the simple rules:  Players need to orthogonally connect four or more Ominoes (dice) that show their respective coloured symbols – this can also include the two different types of wilds – once this is done the Ominoes are scored (1 point each) and removed from the board.  First player to reach the agreed-upon target (depending on players, and/or how long you want to play).

1. In your turn, you’ll roll an Omino.


2. Then you’ll move another Omino with a matching face exactly three spaces.


3. Finally, you’ll add the Omino you just rolled.

Other than the fine print, that is how to play (the YAY-Ra wild allows the roller to move any Omino, and the Omniotep allows the roller to re-roll and replace any other Omino).

SPOILER ALERT (it’s not really a spoiler alert, I was just being melodramatic)

The first time you play this game, it will take you a couple of turns to truly realise how deep the strategy is.  You'll also quickly come to relise that with pretty much every turn you'll be interfering, frustrating and in any other way peeing off your opponents.  

On your subsequent games, the gloves will be off and you’ll come out swinging.  There is this moment I look for now when I play this with others for their first time.  Newbies and veterans alike have this “Oooh” moment when they do a surprise double-take.  The best analogy I can think of is eating a very nice cake, and then suddenly finding it has a gooey sweet centre that you had no idea was there.  If you’re not a “cake person” I hope you can still appreciate the metaphor here.



What I’m getting at, is the surprise that this game packs, is, well surprising.  The game is just a bunch of dice - brilliant, wooden chunky dice with colourful filled engraved icons - and a gridded board.  That’s it.  No cards, tokens, chits.  Certainly no miniatures and not even a whiff of custom meeples.  The game doesn’t need them.  Yet, there is so much game here.  That is why this game feels “classic” like it should have been designed 3,00 years ago, not in 2016.

Two and Three-Player Games

In a two -player game, the rules change every so slightly, each player not only collects sets of their deity/colour, but they will competitively complete sets of the other two that are not in “direct play”, so both players will be trying to finish sets of Ra (Yellow Suns) and Khepri(Blue Scarab Beetle).  In a three-player game, all players can score from the one missing deity/colour.  These changes really help keep the balance, and in fact, make the two-player game far more competitive.  As the board fills up finding just the right spot to not give away point to you opponent becomes harder and harder.

Advanced Games

For those players that want a little more of a challenge, Ominoes answers with Indy’s much despised Snake Pit.  At the centre of the board, there is a two-by-two square “Snake-Pit” that cannot be entered at all, which adds a further level of difficulty very simply.  I’ve found that many newcomers to the game assume that the Snake Pit can’t be entered from the get-go, which makes it an important distinction to make when you play for the first time, as it is much more challenging with the advanced ruless in play.  

With each play of this game, you will face a different problem, regardless of the player count, as Ominoes is, at its core a luck based game, therefore what you roll will determine how each game plays.  Regardless of experience as a gamer, or with this specific game.  Ominoes keeps you on your toes.  There will be games where you roll nothing but little Green Hawks (Horus), and the following game you won’t see one.  Making this game very accessible and, quite simply, very good fun.

Accessing your inner Om

Ominoes does a great job getting around the issue of colour blindness and eyesight issues (for the greater part), all the icons are distinct and clear, even if you can’t make out the colours.  The fundamental depth of this game comes from pattern recognition, you can never truly plan ahead too far, or anticipate your opponent since so much of the game is based upon the roll of a die.



 

All of the above combine to make Ominoes a game that can be played by young or old, experienced or new gamers alike.  And I mean really alike.  This game creates a very level playing field to enjoy some fantastic dice chucking over and over again, with such a very short play time, even with the max player count you can play multiple games within an hour.  This is a perfect breakout game, travel game - especially with the far more transportable Travel edition, which includes a neoprene “board” - or even if you just want to play, have fun and don’t have much time - you won’t get much better than Onimoes.

N.B. The travel version of Ominoes is shortly to be released and at present will only be available direct from YAY Games along with the kick-ass pop-up dice tray



This review is based on a full retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.

 

Brain teasers - Insidezecube review

Today I bring you an article a little bit different than usual. Since I was a kid I've always loved solving riddles and puzzles, it is probably why I enjoy playing games so much nowadays. I've always been a fan of logic riddles. But today I'm going to talk about a different kind of riddles, ones you need other abilities than a quick mind for.

At the UK Games Expo '17, there was a small booth that drew my attention. It was full of very colorful cubes with some kind of inscription on them. They let me try one sample and I was immediately hooked. I purchased one of them and after toying around I got in contact with them to know more about these. I'm talking about the people from insidezecube!



The idea behind these cubes is very simple. You are the ball, and you need to escape the labyrinth in the dark, with just your map. Every labyrinth has several layers and you have a map of each layer where it shows the entries and exits. The exit is on the other side of the cube. You'll move the ball by moving the cube and making it roll, and you'll guide yourself by the sound and hits against the walls.



Simple right? Well, prepare to get lost.  A lot! These things are addictive and in the higher levels, it will take you some time to get to the exit successfully. Yes, they have differents difficulties too.

They've got 6 different levels. Blue is the easiest, with just one way down. Green and orange are the next, which introduces 3-dimensional movement, you're going back and forward between levels. The red and brown they add traps (dead ends) and with the brown, you can't open the cube! And last but not least, for the more intrepid adventurers, you've got the black cube. No map.  No cube opening.  Just you and your senses.

 

[caption id="attachment_1594" align="alignleft" width="300"] The mean family[/caption]

 

They also have 3 different series. The novice series are 5 level labyrinths. The Series 0, which is the original one, has 7 levels. And the 3rd, called the Phantom Series, has an extra ball that is enclosed somewhere in the labyrinth that will mess with your senses. As you can see there is a cube for everyone here.

 



With the exception of the black and brown cubes, you can always open the cube to gain access to the different levels, in case you get lost and want to restart. The assembly is very easy, shaped so the levels can only be introduced one way, and each has an identifier number.

But wait, there is more, one of the questions that I had after toying around with the cube and opening to see how the inside looked, was how about switching the levels to get different labyrinths? Insidezecube had already thought about that. They redirected me to a small webapp with a couple of tools that you're going to love. They have a small questionnaire to help you find the ball if you get lost and don't want to give up and they have one that lets you print different maps.



But the best one of them all is the one that you put the levels you own and it gives you all the possible combinations that have an actual exit. So you're buying the cube but in fact, you have hundreds of combinations with your levels. And if you have two different cubes you can mix and match, just amazing!

These guys from neighbouring France have a great idea in their hands, they started it with a crowd funding and have created a small community around these cubes. They have challenges, people interchanging their cubes and an excellent website full of resources to keep you coming back. I know I'll be waiting first in line for their next evolution in the series. If you're interested in giving it a go, you won't be disappointed. If your local shop doesn't supply on these cubes you can always purchase directly from them with very reasonable prices.

 

[caption id="attachment_1596" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Mortal phantom series 0 (before I got irremediably lost)[/caption]

 

For the moment I'll try to find my way back in the phantom mortal cube again before I go completely insane in that labyrinth... Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

I hope you enjoyed the article. I love this kind of puzzles, and they also deserve a mention in the game's world. They are excellent to bring along on a trip or as a gift.  There are hundreds of great ideas out there. If you like the labyrinth cubes, you might also like these ones too.

 

[caption id="attachment_1597" align="alignleft" width="300"] Kepler's Planetary Puzzle[/caption]

 

I love to get them when I visit the Science Museum in London, a great souvenir if you ask me. The latest one I got was the Kepler's Planetary puzzle from the Great Minds series (I love to challenge my colleagues to solve this under a timer).

 

 



You also have reimplementations of classics like the mix of a Sudoku with a Rubik's cube! (only for the faint of heart and looking for a brain burning experience!) from the people at Vcube.

Thanks for reading and take a look at the innovative great ideas from insedezecube!