A review of Jaipur from W. Eric Martin of Boardgamenews.

The theme of Jaipur – merchants trading and selling goods to earn the most money – isn’t going to excite anyone familiar with modern games. It’s a comforting gloss along the lines of the story in James Cameron’s Avatar, the soft chair of familiarity that you sink into without really thinking about it so that you can get to the good stuff.

And the game play is good, akin to Reiner Knizia’s Lost Cities in the way that luck and skill blur across one another. You roll with the punches of which cards turn up when, while having a larger degree of control over what happens that you initially realize. After five games, I’m getting a better sense of when to cash in goods, when to shoot for large hauls, and when to play for the end of the round – and I feel like there’s more hill to climb in the future.

The card deck in Jaipur contains six types of goods and camels. Players start with five cards in hand, and a display of three camels and two other cards. On a turn you can:

• Pick up a goods card and add it to your hand.
• Take all the camels on display, placing them in your herd on the table.
• Trade cards from your herd and hand for goods on display, adding them to your hand.
• Cash in goods of one type for scoring tokens, taking as many tokens as the number of cards you discard.

1. The most valuable scoring tokens are claimed first, while bonus tokens are available if you cash in three, four or five cards at once. You want to hold out for that five-card wallop, yet by doing so the opponent might claim the more valuable scoring tokens first, shaving off the margin you hoped to gain.

2. You have a hand limit of seven cards, and you bounce against that ceiling all game. You want more in hand to sell in the future, but you can’t take it all – and the more you wait, the more likely your opponent is to beat you to the punch.

In short, while the randomness of the card draw can strike like a loose power line, there’s more going on in Jaipur than is apparent upon the first play, which is another reason not to judge Rattus just yet.