We tried our hands once again last night at Jambo, a game for two players revolving around collecting goods and reselling them at a profit.
The look and feel of it is pretty good: the pieces are easy to distinguish and handle. The mechanics are purely abstract. Although the theme of merchants in pre-industrial Africa is pleasant enough, and the art pretty, they do nothing to help learn the game or remember the various elements’ arbitrary effects. (A witch doctor might force your opponent to discard a utility, and a royal tax might allow you to buy a single trade good of your choice, but their roles could just as easily be reversed, or replaced by runaway trains and investment capital in a game about winning government contracts, or daisies in a game about insect tea parties.) Happily, the learning curve is gentle, so the arbitrary nature of the cards isn’t much of an issue.
Each turn allows the player up to five actions, first drawing a card (which may take more than one action, if a player refuses his first draw and continues to hunt for a better one) then applying any cards he may have available. Each draw, each play of a card, and each activation of a card already in play takes one action. Ultimately, the point is to draw trade goods and resell them at a profit, and trade cards directly allow you to do so, giving you a choice of buying the goods pictured for a low cost or selling those same goods for a higher one, if you can assemble a saleable set.
But beyond this basic mechanic lies a huge variety of cards with effects that only indirectly affect this trading system: witch doctors let you exchange unwanted cards, markets expand your limited warehouse space, hyenas force your opponent to discard from his hand—the list is too long to recite. Some cards can enter play and be activated once per turn (you may employ up to three cards this way); others are used once and discarded. Many cards cost something to activate, whether money or goods or cards. Although the basic mechanic is one of buying and reselling trade tokens, the game is won or lost in the clever and well-timed application of action cards, especially when they can be combined for synergistic effect.
Or, more precisely, the game is won or lost in card play given a healthy dose of luck. Whatever you might wish to do, chances are high the cards won’t cooperate. You must play turn by turn according to what you have on hand, not according to a grand strategy, and it’s entirely possible to win simply because the few cards you draw early on work together while your opponent’s early cards do not. It’s also entirely possible to lose by taking full advantage of your cards: last night, I lost by over-investing in markets and paying gold to activate my cards in search of lucrative plays. Eileene won by sitting tight and making what few moves her cards allowed. Yet it was she, not I, who found the game disappointing, because at no point did she enjoy a sense of control over her game. Her choices were either obvious or absent, and consequently she felt no triumph, while I had a game full of intriguing choices, which I muffed.
That’s a major shortcoming of Jambo. Like Fluxx or San Juan, chances are good that your choices throughout will be obvious and, rather than being fully engaged, you must simply sit back and watch the game unfold, hoping your best and obvious choices will be enough for victory. And if you aren’t the master of your own destiny, why play in the first place? Games like these, physically appealing or full of amusing flavor text, are often fun to explore, but the excitement tends to fade quickly once the components become familiar and a player’s potential helplessness becomes apparent.
Post a Comment