The two-player-only category of games is a crowded genre. It’s crowded with a lot of extremely good games, and I’m not even talking about games that play more players but also happen to play really well at two, like Race for the Galaxy or Innovation. I’m talking about games that are specifically designed for two players and two players only. 7 Wonders Duel, Targi, Star Realms, Splendor Duel, Patchwork, you know the ones. Among all those two-player games, one of the first 2 player games I ever played, and to this day remains one of the best 2 player game in my mind, is Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon in 2009.

In Jaipur, both players are trying to become the best merchant around. Each player is dealt five cards to start, and those cards can be one of six different types of goods. There are the basic goods: leather, spices, and cloth, and the luxury goods: silver, gold, and rubies. The cards can also be camels. Camels never live in your hand, but they sit in front of you on the table. This is important because the hand limit is a huge thing to contend with in Jaipur.

Between the two players is a market of five cards. On your turn, you’ll do one action, and there are a couple of different actions available to you. Probably the easiest one is selling goods. Beside the card market is an arrangement of cardboard pogs, discs arranged in ascending value, with the highest-value token sitting on the top of each stack. Each type of good has its own value structure, and they decrease in value at different rates. The first leather sold is worth five points, but the last five are only worth a point each. Meanwhile, all five silver tokens are worth five points each. The coveted rubies are even better, with the first two sold worth seven points each and the remaining three worth five.

Whenever you sell a set of goods, you take that many tokens from the supply and add them to your area. Those become your points at the end of the round. You can also attract a bonus token if you sell three, four, or five of a good at once. Selling three goods gets you a bonus worth anywhere from one to three points. Selling four gets you four to six points, and selling five gets you a juicy eight to ten points. Because of that, it’s often worth holding out for those extra cards before cashing in.

Another action you can take is trading goods. You can take any number of cards from the market row, but you must place an equal number of cards back into it. This is helpful if, for example, you have two silver, a leather, and a cloth in hand and there are two more silvers sitting in the market. You can grab those silvers and replace them with the leather and cloth. This is where the camels come in. You can always use camels when trading, placing them into the market in exchange for other goods. But here’s where that hand limit matters. You can only hold seven cards in your hand at any time. If you’re already at that limit, you can’t take any more.

The last action is taking camels. If there are camels in the market row, you can simply take all of them and add them to your herd. The market then refills from the deck, potentially offering lucrative goods to your opponent.

Players take turns going back and forth, trading, selling, and accruing camels until three stacks of goods tokens have been depleted. At the end of the round, whoever has the most camels earns a five-point bonus, and then whoever has the most points wins the round. The winner of the game is the first player to win two rounds.

Jaipur is the kind of game that you teach someone who is kind of into games, in order to get them really into games. It’s a card game that feels unique and interesting, and when you walk away from it you can’t help but think about how you could have played better. It’s the kind of genius design that just sticks in your brain.

The push and pull of wanting to hoard goods until you have five of a kind for that really juicy bonus token is constantly juxtaposed against the diminishing returns of waiting too long. It’s not uncommon for one player to notice the other is hoarding all the spices, only to sell two spices from their own hand instead. They don’t get a set bonus, but they do snag the two highest-value spice tokens and leave only the low-value scraps behind. Suddenly that big stockpile your opponent has been carefully building doesn’t look nearly as impressive.

There aren’t enough good things to say about Jaipur. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s replayable, it’s competitive. It’s everything I want from a two-player game. If you have someone in your life who likes playing games with you, this is the perfect game to keep in your bag at all times.

Now, it is a little bit more than just a deck of cards, which makes it slightly awkward if you want to sit down at a coffee shop or in an airport and instantly start playing. But man, is it worth it.

There have been so many times where I’ve been absolutely convinced that I’ve won. I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. Look at all these goods I’ve collected.” Then final scoring happens and I realize I’m somehow almost twenty points behind. Part of that comes from the fact that the value of the scoring tokens are hidden from the other player. You know the value of the goods tokens that have been taken, but once they’re face down you can’t easily recount everything and determine exactly where your opponent stands. Then you add in the set bonus tokens, which are drawn face down, and now you have no idea whether they just scored one point or three points for that sale of three goods last turn.

That little bit of mystery keeps both players on edge. It keeps both players making difficult decisions. Do you take the lucrative points now, or do you chase the bigger payday later? Because that later may never come…

Jaipur is one of those games I could talk about all day. If I were to create a Meeple and the Moose Hall of Fame list, a collection of games that I think are brilliant, nearly perfect, and that everyone should play, Jaipur would be high on that list. In case you’re wondering, a Hall of Fame is different from a Top 100 list. I love Jaipur. It is in my Top 100, though perhaps not as high as you might expect given all the praise I’ve lavished on it here. That mostly comes down to personal proclivities and preferences. I can recognize that Jaipur is a triumph regardless if there are other games I’d usually rather play.

Jaipur has been around for as long as I’ve been involved in board gaming. It was a game that my wife and I played a ton when we first started in the hobby, and even today, when someone tells me, “Oh yeah, I like Catan,” or “I’ve played Ticket to Ride,” Jaipur is one of the first games I reach for. It’s a game that shows people what else games can be.