Making Friends with Commerce

Here's the first in my list of the Top Ten Games That Make Me Love Games. I'll be updating each of these articles with links to the later ones in the future, so if you're reading this in the future, just click through the links at the bottom of each page. For us losers in the present, we just get one article for now.

#10 - Jaipur

Jaipur is not the deepest strategy game ever. You're not going to see Jaipur tournaments, or pages-long threads on BoardGameGeek.com discussing its tactical nuances. I don't care. Not every game needs to be Go or Twilight Struggle. Great games – and great game designers – set out to accomplish something specific and hone in on that goal with everything they've got. As long as the goal is admirable and well accomplished, the game should be praised. I'll never stop praising Jaipur, because it fills an extremely useful role for me and all gamers: it's a ready-made social facilitator.

I've never been great in new social situations. The pressure of meeting new people, finding out what they like and making interesting conversation is just too much. I withdraw into myself. Games help with this immensely. They take so much of the pressure out of socializing. When I'm playing a game, I don't have to be concerned with entertaining – there's this whole other activity keeping everyone's attention. At the same time, tabletop games don't prevent me from socializing. There are still other people around, so there's always the opportunity engage with them when I want to. Tabletop games are like lifejackets for the socially awkward: you can wade into conversations while still having something to stop you from drowning.

Not all games are well suited for this purpose. Some are too complex to be casually playable, others are too time-sensitive to allow for conversation, sill others are so social that they exacerbate rather than solve the problem. But Jaipur is perfect for it. It's simple enough that you can learn it quickly and play automatically, but deep enough to provide distraction when you want it. Best of all, it's for two players. One-on-one situations always pack the most pressure, at least for me. Being able to sit across the table from a stranger and not worry about constantly engaging them is incredibly freeing. I'll always love Jaipur for that.

Here's the premise: both players are merchants, seeking to gain as much money as possible by acquiring and selling various goods. These goods are represented by cards; there are also camel cards. Each good has a pile of tokens, representing the money you get for selling it. On your turn, you can do one thing: either take cards or sell goods, but never both. The first option always involves drawing from a “market” of five face-up cards. There are three ways to do it: take one good into your hand and refill the market from the deck; take all the camels in the market, put them in front of you and refill the market from the deck; or take multiple goods and refill the market yourself, using either goods from your hand or the camels in front of you. However, you can't have more than seven goods in your hand, so you'll have to sell goods eventually. To do so, you pick any type of good from your hand and discard all of them, taking the equivalent number of tokens from the appropriate pile. As you dig deeper into a good's money pile, the tokens become less and less valuable – demand goes down, lowering your revenue, so you want to sell fairly quickly to avoid losing out. However, if you sell a bunch of goods at once, you'll get bonus points, rewarding hoarders as well. The game continues until three token piles run out or the deck runs out of cards. Whoever has the most camels gets five extra money, whoever has the most money wins the round and you play best two out of three rounds.

That's pretty much it. There's enough there to make it interesting, but not so much that you get bogged down by options. After all, you can only do one thing on your turn and it's usually pretty obvious what you should do. Sell cards if you've got a bunch of stuff, take cards if you don't. The game can pretty much play itself, because there's so little to keep track of. Flip cards, draw cards, discard cards, grab tokens – it feels very rhythmic, allowing the game to easily disappear into the background, letting conversation take over if that's what interests the players. Maybe you want to talk about the latest sports match by the local Home Team – I sure do hope they beat those nasty Visitors with balls, sticks, fists or a combination! The design of Jaipur recognizes that games are a great backdrop for socialization and lets that shine through.

However, not everybody is great at small talk. Jaipur is here to help us too. Interesting strategic decisions are available, if you want to pursue them. Most of the time, the steady thrum of flipping cards is a backbeat for whatever else is going on, but every so often there's a record scratch and the game asks you to focus. Should you take those valuable rubies sitting in the market, or sell your hide before the price plummets? You've got no camels and you want some more, but is it worth the risk of giving your opponent first dibs on whatever replaces them? Is now the right time to end the game by depleting the third pile of tokens, or should you try to eke out a few more sales? These are not the most complex questions you'll ever be faced with in a game, but they provide enough food for thought to give you a plausible distraction if there's a lull in conversation.

That is the genius of Jaipur. It lets the players choose the experience they want. If you just need something to do with your hands while talking, here it is. If you want a thirty-minute strategic competition, you've got that too. If your whim changes throughout the game, don't worry about it; there's little to keep track of, so the game can easily adjust its pace to yours. That's social facilitation at its finest and it's why Jaipur is such a valuable, wonderful, fascinating game. It helps save us poor nerds from drowning in our own discomfort, but doesn't shelter us from the outside world. And it proves one of the theses of this blog: there is more to judge a game by than the math puzzles it presents you with.


Next time: #9 - Alien Frontiers

Images courtesy of Asmodee.com and DiceHateMe.com, respectively.