| Game
Overview
Jambo
is Swahili for Hello and in keeping with
this pleasantry both players assume the
roles of Swahili traders. The aim is to
buy and sell wares through your marketplace
to make the most gold. Each player starts
with 20 gold and a large marketplace that
has room for 6 wares. Each player then takes
5 cards from the deck and play begins. Each
player can take up to 5 actions per turn
and their turn is split into 2 phases. Phase
1 allows the active player to draw a new
card from the deck. Doing so costs 1 of
the 5 available action tokens and the player
can choose to keep or discard the drawn
card. If discarded the player can spend
another action to draw another card and
all 5 actions can be used in this way until
a card is kept. Once the player chooses
to keep a drawn card, phase 1 comes to an
end and no further cards can be drawn. Phase
2 then allows the player to play any card(s)
from their hand. Each card played in such
a way also costs an action. Many of the
cards depict a variety of wares, which include
trinkets, fruit, furs, tea, silk and salt.
Each of these cards also has two numbers
- a buy value and a sell value. When playing
a card the player can choose to buy or sell
the wares on the card and pay or collect
the appropriate value. A card can only be
used to buy wares if all wares depicted
are available from the supply piles. Likewise
a player can only sell a ware card if they
have all the wares depicted on the card.
Through these cards the players can fill
their market stalls and sell their goods
for a profit. To spice up the play the deck
also includes a large variety of people,
animal and utility cards all of which cost
an action to play. The people and animal
cards offer a once off use. They may allow
a player to draw more cards, discard a card
for gold, pay gold to take a ware of choice
etc. The animal cards are usually used to
effect your opponent by making them swap
wares with you, loose a utility, discard
cards etc. The utility cards are a little
different. They require an action to play
but they remain in the game and are placed
behind your market stall. Each player can
have up to 3 utilities in play at once and
the effect of the utility can be activated
once per turn by using an action. The deck
of cards also contains 5 small market stalls,
which can hold up to 3 additional wares.
These are very useful as a player must pay
an extra 2 gold when buying wares if they
completely fill their large market stall.
By buying a small stall this can more easily
be avoided. The game continues until 1 player
earns 60 gold or more. This triggers the
end of the game but the other player gets
1 more turn to try and earn more gold than
their opponent. This is a neat little feature
as a close game will have players nervous
about only just reaching or creeping past
60 gold.
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