Jaipur Board Game

1. Jaipur Board Game Target
2. Jaipur Game Online

Card trading games can be a bit hit and miss, with the main culprit for a lack of accessibility being overly complex rules, lengthy games or a lack of inspiring theme or artwork. Jaipur does away with all of this, leaving us with a fun, strategic trading game that doesn’t need to take an age to play and can be learnt in just a few minutes. Which is nice.

The main idea behind Jaipur is to collect and sell various products such as gold, tea and leather at the highest price possible. Selling goods sooner than the other player means you earn the higher value rewards, but save your stock a bit until you can sell multiple at once and you’ll get a bonus for a bulk sale. On each turn you’ve got the option to take a single item from the market, so collecting can be slow – do you get in early for the slightly more expensive sale, or save up for the bonus? That’s one of the many dilemmas you’ll face when playing Jaipur, another of which revolves around your camels.

Yeah I know. Camels. They might sound like they’d be a fairly pointless part of the game, but the reality is very different. They’re easy to forget, but one of the things you can do on your turn is to trade cards, letting you swap out multiple cards from your hand with the same number from the open market that lies on the table between the players. Often that’ll mean getting rid of a couple of leather items and some silver in exchange for three gold cards, or whatever. But you can also swap out camels from your collection, meaning you keep all of your current cards and pick up several more as well. With the right set of cards on the table, that can make a massive difference to your scoring potential. But how to get the camels? Well, as with all other cards you can pick them up, but unlike the normal goods where you can only take a single card and end your turn, camels come in a herd. If there are three camels face up on the table and you want another camel, you have to take all of them. That in itself isn’t a problem; there’s no limit to how many you can hold and you even get a bonus if you end the game with more camels, but it opens up another big issue.

A Spiel des Jahres Recommended game, Jaipur is one of the most most well-loved 2-player tabletop games. Jaipur is a fast-paced card game for two players with a blend of tactics, risk and luck. You are one of the most powerful traders in Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan.

See, when the cards are taken they get replenished off the deck. If you take 4 camels, that’s 4 new cards that need to be turned over and added to the market. If you’re lucky they’ll be tea, leather or some other low scoring item. But if you end up with gold and diamonds on the table, you’ve opened the door for the other player to do a big swap and grab all the decent goodies at once. Do you really need four more camels? Well, maybe you do, but it’s a risk you sometimes need to take.

1. You are hoping to become the Maharaja's personal trader by being richer than your opponent at the end of each week (round). To do so, collect and exchange goods (cards) at the market, then sell them for rupees (on the back of the tokens).
2. So I can highly recommend Jaipur to anyone who wants a two-player only game, that is light and a great filler. Despite its age, the game really doesn't feel old. The mechanisms still work really well and the game can easily compete with other, modern filler games.
3. Our step-by-step guide to the rules of how to play Jaipur Board Game. This is one of the best 2 player board games in existence and is a fantastic showdown meant to be a card trading game where you play off the moves of your opponent. You have simple choices to make but just enough freedom to brew a mean strategy up against the other player.

So besides a few scoring rules, there isn’t much more to the game. Each turn is super quick thanks to only having one action to take, and as your options are to take a single card, swap multiple cards, grab all the camels or make a sale there’s not much to hold people up, especially once you’ve played a couple of games. It’s so easy to learn, but the strategy and luck behind each game means you’ve got a lot of gaming here before you get bored of it. Younger kids might struggle with the forward thinking, so that’s something to consider, but on the whole this is a very enjoyable trading game, stripping away the layers of complexity to leave an accessible, fun and fast game.

Jaipur 2nd Edition
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If you're anything like us, Valentine's Day brings to mind iconic images of candlelit dinners, boxes of chocolate, roses, and, of course, board games.

'What tabletop games are best for couples?' is a question we get all the time here at Ars Cardboard, and today we're answering (again) by reprising our 2016 two-player guide with fresh new picks. Of course, you don't have to be romantically linked to your gaming partner to enjoy these titles; our recommendations are perfect for any time your group is running behind and you only have one other person to push some cubes with. Or maybe you don't have a group—all you need to play these games is one other willing (or kinda-sorta willing) partner.

The games below are new-player-friendly card and board games (sorry, we're not tackling miniatures or wargames today) that can be played in an hour or less. While most board games accommodate two players—many quite well—we've found that the best two-player experiences are often those built from the ground up for duos. So we're sticking with two-player-only games for this list (including one that has recently added support for other player counts).

If your favorite game didn't make the cut (and with the endless list of great two-player games, it may not have), share your picks with us in the comments.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

7 Wonders Duel

7 Wonders Duel, a two-player version of the modern classic 7 Wonders, retools the civ-building-with-cards mechanism of the bigger game into something quick, tense, and interesting from turn one.

On every turn, spread across three 'ages,' you select an available card from the table in front of you and either build it with resources, discard it for money, or use it to build one of the game's titular 'wonders.' Building cards gives you wood, stone, glass, bricks, parchment, scientific achievements, military power, or luscious, unadulterated victory points.

You win the game in one of three ways: victory points, military invasion, or complete scientific dominance. (A clever military track across the top of the game spaces uses a 'push-pull' mechanism between players to track military supremacy; move the shield pawn all the way into the opponent's base and the game ends immediately.) Along the way, you'll build your personal set of wonders to provide powerful bonuses, more resources, and occasionally additional turns.

While the full 7 Wonders uses card drafting to make these same mechanisms work, Duel relies on drawing from specific geometrical card arrangements, such as a pyramid in which every other row of cards is face down and certain cards are only available once the cards below them are removed. This turns the process of card collection into a puzzle of its own, as you don't want to expose powerful cards that you want (or cards you want to deny your opponent) until you're in a place to snap them up.

Best of all, the whole thing offers a meaty experience in around 30 minutes and stores its goodness in a small box. Stop what you're doing right now and go buy this game.

Jaipur

The best gaming partner you have access to might just be your real-life partner. And unless your significant other is as much of an uber-gamer as you are, you'll need to pull out something less intimidating than Terra Mystica when you want to get a game in. Atop the pantheon of two-player games sits the storied 'couples game,' and Jaipur, a game about trading goods in India, is perhaps the perfect realization of the form. It's a snap to teach, it plays in about 30 minutes, and it's interactive in the best of ways.

At the beginning of the game, both players are dealt a hand of cards representing various goods—spice, silk, leather, etc.—and camels, which aren't goods but can be used in trades. A central market of five more goods cards is dealt to the middle of the table. On your turn, you're presented with a deceptively simple choice: get new goods or sell the goods you already have. To get goods, you can either trade cards with the market or take a card from the market without giving anything up. If you decide to sell, you'll discard all the goods of a certain type and be rewarded with tokens representing money. The value on the money tokens goes down as more and more goods are sold, so you want to sell quickly to get the best price. But conflicting with this 'SELL NOW' mentality are the stacks of bonus tokens. The more goods you sell at once, the better bonus you'll get. Do you sell your two silk now to get the best price, or do you hold out and hope to collect more so you can get that nice, juicy five-card bonus token?

Jaipur is a great game of tug-of-war that provides a surprising amount of tense decisions within a small decision space.

KeyForge: Call of the Archons

Any self-respecting list of two-player tabletop games must include a card dueling game, and our pick this year is Richard Garfield's super-hot 2018 release Keyforge: Call of the Archons. The game's schtick is an odd one: Keyforge is a CCG-style card game that forbids deckbuilding. Instead of asking you to buy booster packs or chase down coveted cards on the secondhand market to build a killer deck, KeyForge wants you to let it do heavy lifting for you. Specifically, an algorithm assembles every deck and assigns it a unique name and card back—you buy it and play it, no alterations allowed.

But beyond the intriguing distribution premise, the game is a ton of fun to play. There's no mana economy to manage; instead, each deck has cards from three of the game's 'houses,' and you can only play and activate cards from the house that you declare as active at the beginning of your turn. Creatures you play can attack each other, of course, but the goal of the game is not to reduce your opponent's health to zero. Instead, three 'keys' must be constructed by using the game's 'ember' resource, and collecting ember is one of the actions available to creatures, forcing you to choose between attacking and resource gathering. There are a lot of fun and interesting decisions to make.

KeyForge has a nascent tournament scene, but although the game has some baked-in mechanics for balancing powerful cards and decks, I'm not sure the game has competitive legs. As a kitchen-table brawl between friends, though, it's a blast. A starter set, which includes tokens and four decks (two handcrafted 'learning' decks and two regular, algorithm-constructed decks) is available for around $40, or you can just pick up two $10 packs and see what you get.

Patchwork

Jaipur Board Game Target

A light, two-player game about quilting from the designer best known for the heavy serf farming epic Agricola, the heavy Frisian farming epic Fields of Arle, and the heavy dwarf farming epic Caverna? Yup—and it couldn't be better.

Patchwork is a two-player game about picking up fabric pieces and assembling them, Tetris-like, onto your personal square game board while simultaneously trying to maximize the number of 'buttons' (essentially, money) that these pieces deposit in your personal treasury. The game uses a wonderful circular movement mechanic to ensure that, on each turn, players have a choice of just three fabric pieces—but that these three change constantly.

Jaipur Game Online

The rules can be explained in a couple of minutes, the gameplay is quick (20 minutes) and non-confrontational, and play is smooth and engaging. Many Tetris-like puzzle games have flooded the market over the past few years, and Patchwork remains our favorite.