Thoughts on… Jaipur

The hot sun beats down from a cloudless sky, glinting off stalls filled with gold, silver, jewels and baking the sand beneath your feet. The cry of traders hawking their wares assails you as you wander the crowded alleyways of this desert market. These second rate merchants can’t see the opportunities a canny businessman such as yourself thrives on. You will take their goods and spin a profit they can only dream of! You reach out and feel the quality of a silk merchant’s wears. Everywhere is the aroma of exotic spices, except… hold on, is that… camel dung? Before you can ponder this further the silks are yanked from your grasp, and as you spin around in confusion you realise the gold, the jewels, everything has been replaced by camels!

Well, what did you expect? This is Jaipur! Where the humble camel becomes the secret weapon of an ambitious trader. And none come more ambitious than you and your rival, competing for the favour of the Maharaja himself.

Battle will occur across the markets of Jaipur to be the one who trades in the most goods, or at least to be the one who trades something in first… or to just have the most camels…? Because new goods are exciting and everyone wants them, so you want to sell as quickly as possible to get the best prices. But selling sets of 3, 4 or even 5 identical goods at a time will net you a large bonus because… reasons… so you want to wait and build a set first. Except what if your rival slips in and sells before you?? Making all the best sales and leaving you with a set of near worthless hide!

Ssshhh now, calm down. Its ok. Let me explain.

You see those tokens? Those beautiful splayed layers of luxurious cardboard with the steadily increasing values? Those are your reward for selling your goods. Offload 3 green spice cards and you casually lean over and pluck the 3 highest value tokens off the pile. Oh! And whats that? A set of 3! I’ll take one of those black bonus tokens too, thank you very much! But given how the token values scale the deeper into the stack you go, the more likely it is that your opponent will swoop in and steal the cream of the crop.

So, imagine! You have 2 carts of gold: do you sell now, for the juicy victory points, or wait, hoping to pick up just one more load of gold and boost your score? Because its just one more gold… it’ll appear in the market soon, right? Meanwhile that pair is sitting there, clogging up your very limited storage space. And silver is flooding the market and if you don’t grab it now your rival sure as heck will! So you sell your gold and the next thing on the market is… MORE GOLD GOD DAMN YOU WHY!?

At least you have space to buy more goods, but having too few goods is as bad as having too many, because now you have nothing to trade… unless you have some camels. Because in Jaipur, camels are worth as much as jewels or as little as hide, whatever you want from the market, if you have a camel you can make that happen my friend! But where do you get camels from? Well instead of taking or trading goods, you can always take all the camels from the market and add them to your herd. But do that and the market is filled up with new goods that your rival is going to get first pick of. Is it worth gifting your rival jewels for the sake of a couple of camels?

And suddenly you see it: camels as the weapon of choice for the canny businessman/woman. Trade camels into the market to clog it up, forcing your opponent to take them and open a slew of new goods for you to chose from first. Or just introduce one or two camels to tempt an opponent who is desperate to get hold of some (perhaps he had to eat his herd during a particularly arduous desert crossing*).

Now, you’re unstoppable! But before you know it, the limited pool of victory points is disappearing and you’re both desperately scrounging around for whatever sets of worthless goods you can get your greedy mitts on. Then just as you’ve built one last set your rival sells one putrid packet of spice to take the last token and end the game before you can sell your beautiful collection of silks!

Some may say this is a game of being in the right place at the right time, having it be your turn when the high value goods turn up on the market. Even the Maharaja recognises the luck factor: he enforces a strict “best 2 out of 3” policy for his favours. But this game is much more about deciding when to push your luck, and when to seize an opportunity for quick victory points. Its also a game that rewards knowing your opponent, knowing how far they are willing to push for the set rewards, and how to best disrupt their plans.

And the best thing about this game? That when you have been proclaimed victorious you may wear your Seal of Excellence with pride, for the rest of the day…

… or at least until your opponent tells you to stop being a prat.

 

 

Rating: A golden camel

 

*not an actual game mechanism… though wouldn’t it be cool!?