In the world of two-player board games, Jaipur shines like a topaz—radiant and multifaceted. It’s an uncomplicated contest of low-level commerce, quick thinking, avarice, and guile. But you’re buying and selling over a backdrop of the cream-and-orange dream world that is the city of the Indian desert. Jaipur is also a game that’s particularly easy to learn if you’re a complete novice.
Jaipur distinguishes itself with a beautiful ease. The underlying rules are as simple as they come and extremely easy to understand, ensuring that the game is open to all people. Yet the tension that builds up as each round unfolds is delightful, owed very much to the fact that the game is always contested between two opponents (there are no three-player variants that ensure everyone’s got a larger force to start with, as in a game like Risk). To win, one must make the best decisions, use the best tactics, and have the best timing. The period of play lasts about 30 minutes, and a round that has even an extra minute of tension would outlast its welcome.
Jaipur’s components are not just attractive but also serve a real purpose. The card deck at the heart of the game has all sorts of goods that a player can buy or sell. The many ways to earn points in the game are shown by various tokens, and each card and each token has some lovely bit of artwork that captures the 18th-century Indian milieu of thriving marketplaces. Jaipur isn’t just pretty to look at, though. The game asks the player to make tactical and strategic decisions. Should I trade for more camels? Should I push for a sale now? Should I hold onto these “silk” cards because I think they might be worth a lot more in a few turns? These are just some of the questions a player asks herself during a game of Jaipur.
Countless rounds of the game Jaipur have taught me one thing: it is an extraordinarily charming game and has very good replayability. Its game mechanics represent a very good mixture of luck and skill, as no two games are really the same. The wonderful thing for me is that even after so many games, my family, friends, and I still don’t tire of it. Jaipur is as good a staple as it is a game.
Setup
Getting Jaipur up and running is quite a simple matter, and I think that’s a big part of the reason it’s often favored for impromptu game sessions. All one must do to set up this two-player game is shuffle the 55-card deck, which includes six types of goods cards and also some camel cards, and then “create a market.” Three of these camel cards get placed face-up in the center of the playing area, and two additional cards get drawn from the deck to fill out the “market” to a five-card lineup. So, as you can see, one of the great things about this game, for starters, is the really small setup footprint—there’s not much to it.
In Jaipur, each participant is dealt a five-card opening hand. This isn’t a card game wherein the dealer’s role swaps amongst the players. Both competitors start on an even footing, resource-wise, and are subsequently offered the same resource choices from the game’s market. If anything, a player might have a superior strategy or make better resource decisions, and it still comes down to luck even then. And if you’re not a fan of luck being a factor at all? Well, with Jaipur, it tends to still be a pleasant experience.
Next, sort the tokens into piles. The piles are broken up according to the kind of good the token represents. Higher value goods are generally on top of the stack. A leather token isn’t going to be worth as much as a diamond token. If you only have a few diamond covering pieces in the game, you’re probably going to fight tooth and nail to keep them. So by keeping all potential points close handy, even just considering ‘near at hand’ in the pile over here, you’re going to be better off in the long run.
Also, keep the camel counters close by. They count for a lot in this game. For one, as the game moves toward its conclusion, the player with the most camels generally wins. And there’s a good reason it tells you this right up front. Not only is it useful for working out the basic math of the victory point totals but all those camels also work as a powerful tool for acquiring more powerful cards. The person who invests heavily in camels effectively has more sea left with which to swim and can generally take the procedural extra turns to do what you’d expect a well-tided player to do: win.
Finally, position the two Seals of Excellence so they’re accessible to both players. They’re earned through victories, not purchases, and your goal in this game is to win a “best of three” during the two-to-three rounds you and your opponent will play. With that, Jaipur’s setup is complete, and now you two can get lost in the ancient world and crowded marketplaces of this classic title.
One piece of advice I can share from my experience is to be certain you have ample room for laying out the marketplace and the token pile. The game does not, on the surface, seem to demand much table space. But it can be a fun form of competition if the players have the room they need to spread out the cards between them and if they have a sufficient patio to play with the wares that are sold in the marketplace in the game. After all, a pair of players needs the few simple wares (that come in quite a few forms) that are sold in Jaipur’s marketplace to project the marketplace as more than just a tabletop way station. And a board game version of a way station might as well be a very space-efficient one…
Strategy
While gathering resources, competitors have the option to draw a single card from the market and add it to their hand or to initiate a larger action by which they acquire more cards from the set within the market and replace them either with the cards in their hand or cards from their camel-caravan resource. This latter action is, perhaps, the more overlooked of all actions in the gameplay, considering that larger actions are generally taken to be good, yet taking all camels as one’s action is often perceived as silly or even boring among newcomers.
In Jaipur, the strategy comes from not just what you sell but also when and how you go about it. From your hand, you can put up for sale any number of camels, or any single type of other goods. There are a few methods that you can employ, and a few different times at which you can do so.
Considering that the prospect of selling any kind of goods three, four, or even just five times in a game exists, it might be safe enough to view that kind of ambition as a form of strategy (but, of course, you must consider all of your vendors’ rivaling moves!).
A crucial part of the game involves managing how many cards you hold. Players can only have seven cards in their hand at once. When you have more than that, you have to choose to either discard cards or put them in your caravans. Discarding makes sense if the cards are worth a lot of points because you think another player is going to trade for them or lay claim to them. But discarding cards that are worth next to nothing isn’t necessary because those cards don’t put you in danger of holding more than seven. If you have a few camels, everything is okay, because they don’t count toward the seven.
The game goes on until any three kinds of merchandise are sold out or the deck is spent. Count your stock at any point and award the yellow ribbon to the player who has the most camels. Both how much of each kind of merchandise you have and how many of your camels are in your herd (when you weren’t allowed to use them as zombies) count toward winning. Consistently buying trade chips or the same kind of token as a ploy to keep them out of the hands of another player also has the potential to win.
The gameplay of Jaipur is an excellent mix of decision-making and strategic planning. The game is rarely similar; the dynamic market ensures that. The game is all about balance—when to collect or sell, which goods to deal with, when to use the camels to advantage. Right from the start, I didn’t just feel that I was playing a 2009 game from the outset, but really a game that could have existed at any time. It engages at a 2000-year-old level of abstract thinking since it is just a bit more thinky than mancala.
In my opinion, Jaipur is just helter-skelter amazing. It seems to be able to perfectly accommodate any number of nebulous emergent divisions in the way games can be played. Yet at the same time, it beautifully and explicitly embodies the same divisions, so that the way it “ought” to be played is clear and recognizable. And THEN, it sits back and lets the players create new magic together, without falling into “you’re doing it wrong” as an ethos somehow hinged on the crazily-smart balance that’s built into the way it works.
Another big plus of the game is its pace. Rounds are snappy and usually clock in at about 30 minutes, so Jaipur is a great game to choose if you want a fast and fulfilling play experience. The brief nature of the game doesn’t make it any less gratifying, either; you’re loading each camels you sent moving and ostensibly gives you a reward worth it. The pacing is one of the best parts in my opinion, and I feel that Stewart Woods should be commended for this aspect of the design if nothing else.
