I’ve loved Orléans for a decade now. Twice it’s made it into the top 20 of my top 100 games of all time, which is not a small feat when you consider how many games on that list get shuffled around. Whenever I think about Orléans, it’s mostly fond memories. Those plays where you manage to pull everything you need from the bag, where you’re one turn ahead of someone, blocking them from building guild halls, or just the fact that when you play Orléans, everything just feels satisfying. But something unexpected happened recently. I joined a two-player tournament for Orléans on Board Game Arena and played ten two player games in fairly quick succession, and by the end of it, I found myself a little less in love with the game than when I started.
But before I get into that, it’s worth touching on what Orléans actually feels like to play. At its heart, it’s a bag-building game where you’re slowly constructing a pool of workers. Everyone starts with the same handful of tokens, and each round you’re drawing a number of workers from your bag and slotting them into these little “recipes” on your board to make things happen. Those actions might get you more workers, push you up tracks, or unlock new abilities. Most of what you do feeds back into this loop of adding workers to your bag to expand your capabilities, improving your board, or letting you draw more workers each round. And that sense of constant forward motion is a big part of the appeal.
The tracks in Orléans are the focal point of the game. In general, you’ll take an action, you move up a track, and you usually get two things: a new worker corresponding to that track, and some kind of bonus. Farmers get you food, fishermen bring in coins, guards increase how many tokens you draw each round, and craftsmen let you place these little gear tiles that permanently discount your actions. Those gears are especially satisfying, locking in an efficiency boost that you can’t ever undo, but also means you’ll never have to pay for it again. There is also a track that will give you new actions, which can either tweak something you already have access to, or give you entirely new, often better, actions to work with. And then there’s the development track, which is a score multiplier for the end of the game. Ignore that track at your own peril.
Alongside all of those tracks, you’ve got movement on a map. Using carts on roads and boats on rivers, you’ll race to establish guild halls in cities. There’s only one spot per city (except in Orléans), so getting to each city first matters. A lot. At the end of the game, a large portion of your is the combination of how many citizens you’ve picked up and how many guild halls you’ve placed, multiplied by your development level. I find it endlessly satisfying at the end of the game when players are rushing about trying to drop as many guild halls as possible, to jump ahead on the road and put a house up right before they arrive. I know, I’m evil.
One of the more subtle pressures in Orléans is that nothing is infinite. Tracks have caps, worker pools can run dry, and if a type of worker is gone, the track becomes unavailable to everyone, even if you haven’t maxed out that track yet. So there’s this constant race happening. Often, being just one step ahead or other players on these tracks is often enough to completely derail what they were hoping to do.
What I’ve always loved about Orléans is that sense of progression. You start off painfully weak, and almost everything you do makes you better. You draw more tokens, your actions get cheaper, your options expand. By the end of the game, when you’re pulling eight workers out of your bag and some of your key actions only cost one or two workers, it feels great.
With more than two players, the game really sings. People are constantly sniping the thing you were just about to do, finishing a track to snag a citizen, grabbing a new action tile, completing a beneficial deed one turn before you, it all forces you to stay flexible. There’s a nice amount of tension around the shared spaces that makes the turn order feel really consequential, especially those citizens that reward whoever finishes something first.
But in that two-player tournament, something else emerged. Everyone seemed to fall into very well-worn strategies almost immediately. It didn’t take long for optimal openings to reveal themselves, and once they did, it felt like deviating from them was just… wrong. You’d have to prioritize those development tiles that make your actions cheaper, because if you don’t, the other player will take them all and run away with the game. I had one match where that happened, he ignored them and I hoovered them all up. By round 10 of 18 my opponent basically said, “I don’t think I can come back from this,” and he was right. I was drawing eight workers and paying one or two workers for most of my actions while he was paying three, the math just doesn’t work in his favour, especially because we were both hitting that draw cap.
The same thing happens with the tiles that grant new actions. In theory, having access to all of them when you gain one is exciting. It lets you tailor your strategy to the emerging situations. In practice, it often leads to players picking the same strongest or most comfortable options over and over again. Over multiple plays, especially back-to-back plays in a tournament, that starts to feel boringly repetitive. The variety is technically there, but you have to choose to engage with it, and optimal play doesn’t always reward that.
So between the potential for runaway leaders and the emergence of scripted openings, is Orléans still a game I’d recommend? Yeah, I think it is. But with a caveat. I think Orléans is at its best with more players, where the board state is more chaotic, the competition is tighter, and you’re forced to adapt more often. That’s where the game feels alive.
I also know there are variants that limit the available tiles to a small display instead of the full set, and I might prefer that approach when it comes to playing 2 player games. It nudges players toward trying different things and occasionally making suboptimal choices, which paradoxically often makes the game more interesting.
Even with some of the shine worn off, Orléans is still a great bag-building game. And the fact that it took me 20 or 30 plays to even start feeling that fade says a lot. Any game that hits the table that many times has earned its place in my top 100, even if it’s no longer quite as untouchable as it once felt.
I’ve talked about a bunch of polyomino tile-laying games on this blog, from Project L to the more recent Frosted Blooms, and in those posts I’ve often said that I really enjoy poluomino tile laying games. I still suspect a lot of this joy comes from my background in Tetris. My mom was very good at Tetris, and she would mercilessly crush me when we played multiplayer, until I got my first job and with my first-ever paycheck as a teenager, I bought myself a GameCube and a copy of Tetris and practiced and practiced in my room until I could finally bury her in junk lines.
Take that, Mom.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Bärenpark.
In Bärenpark, players are trying to build the best bear park. Every player starts with one 4×4 entrance tile and one of the green enclosure tiles, the size of which depends on your player order. These green enclosure tiles are small attractions, like a food stand or a porta-potty. They can be one, two, or three squares large and come either in a straight line or in a small L shape. On the central board in front of all players, there’s also a bunch of small bear enclosure tiles arranged in stacks. Each of these enclosures are 4 squares large and each of the 4 types are in the classic Tetris tetromino-style shapes, and the highest point value tile is on the top of each stack. Lastly, covering nearly half of the entire supply board are the coveted large enclosure tiles, which are five or six squares large and worth a healthy chunk of points.
Your 4×4 entrance tile is littered with icons. There are green wheelbarrows, white cement trucks, and construction crews. Covering those icons earns you pieces of the corrosponding type. Cover a wheelbarrow and you gain a small attraction tile. Cover a cement truck and you gain a medium bear enclosure tile. Cover a construction crew and you get to take another 4×4 park tile to expand your zoo.
Each turn, players simply place one tile from their supply onto their park, making sure it’s adjacent to an existing tile. Then, if they covered any icons in their zoo, the collect the corrosponding rewards and the next player takes their turn. The game ends when someone manages to completely fill all four of their 4×4 park sections, including the one they started with.
In addition to the points you earn directly from the various bear enclosures you’re placing into your park, there are a couple of other scoring opportunities. First, whenever you completely fill one of your 4×4 park sections, you get to erect a bear statue. The first player to do this scores the most points, and the statues steadily decrease in value as the stack gets depleted. There are also three randomly selected objectives available every game. Sometimes these are straightforward, like being the first player to collect three Panda bear enclosures, or just have three orange tiles touching each other. Other times they’re much trickier, requiring specific spatial arrangements, such as placing three L-shaped green tiles end-to-end. These objectives make the spatial planning aspect of Bärenpark significantly more challenging than it first appears.
Because you’re earning points from so many different places, from the bear statues, from the various enclosures, and from the objectives, and the fact that each of those point sources are slowly diminishing, you’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Do you place the piece that will finish a 4×4 section and secure a valuable statue? Or is it more important to stretch off into a new area and cover two icons with a single placement? Maybe you don’t have a need for that 2×2 yellow tile, it doesn’t fit perfectly anywhere in your park right now, but it’s the highest point value piece available, and you can see that your opponent does have a perfect spot for it. Is it worth taking now? Also, if you place a tile and don’t cover an icon, do you have an extra piece in your reserve to play next turn? If you don’t, you need to burn an entire turn taking a single green tile, which is a huge disadvantage.
It’s managing all those little decisions that makes Bärenpark really fun to play for me.
I find Bärenpark infinitely replayable. Every time I sit down with this puzzle, I’m delighted. Even if the core game always feels fundamentally the same, there’s just something about this system that just keeps me coming back and brings a smile to my face every time I play. When the odd shapes just fall in your favor and you manage to always be one step ahead of your opponents, netting an extra point here and a small bonus there, it’s great. And then when you eventually stumble across the finish line and count everything up to find that you won by a mere 5 points, it feels incredibly gratifying.
Of course, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you get to the end of the game and discover your park is dotted with tiny single-square holes. Holes that you now need to spend round after round filling those holes with porta-potties, because apparently you thought it was more important to lay your 3 large enclosures in a weird shape just so they touched, all so you could earn that one objective, and your two opponents managed to achieve it before you did! That part of the game is much less fun.
But hey. Skill issue, right? I don’t know how, but I rarely come in 2nd in Bärenpark. I’m either absolutely crushing my opponents, or being crushed. There is no middle ground.
What I appreciate most about Bärenpark is how focused it is. If you like polyomino tile-laying games, Bärenpark is about as good as it gets. There’s nothing here to distract from the spatial puzzle. There aren’t any markets to manipulate, side mechanisms to explore, or layers of complexity piled on top of the core experience. This game is simply about taking tiles, placing tiles, and trying to make them all fit together as efficiently as possible.
If spatial puzzles are your jam and you haven’t played Bärenpark yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.
I initially didn’t plan on playing Final Fantasy X-2. But one of my friends decided to join me on my Final Fantasy X playthrough. And by join me, we played our games separately and texted each other our exciting and frustrating moments. When we both finished, I mentioned I was going to play Final Fantasy XII next. He suggested I wait a bit so he could have a bit of a JRPG detox, then he’d join me on that one as well. So with all the wonderfully deep and melancholic feelings in my heart from the end of Final Fantasy X, I decided to spin up Final Fantasy X-2. I wasn’t really ready to leave Spira, I really liked the world and the characters and the story. I was interested in what the first direct sequel in the Final Fantasy franchise would hold.
Now, I had tried playing Final Fantasy X-2 back in 2014 when I bought the Final Fantasy X/X-2 remaster for the PS3. And the only thing I really remembered was launching Final Fantasy X-2, seeing Yuna singing and dancing in a Brittany Spears-esque JPOP dance sequence, then promptly turning the game off. Yeah, I really never game it a chance. Well, that changes now!
Story
Yes, the opening cutscene does have Yuna singing and dancing in a Pop concert. She’s the centre of attention and fans are cheering her on, but cut in-between shots of Yuna’s performance we see Rikku and Paine knocking out guards and sneaking backstage.
A little later on we discover that the Yuna who was dancing in the concert was actually LeBlanc, a sphere hunter and leader of Leblanc Syndicate. Leblanc stole Yuna’s dressphere and was trying to cash in on her fame. Yuna, has joined forces with Rikku and Paine to form the Gullwings, whose mission is to hunt spheres, because… they’re valueable?
It turns out there’s a 15 minute cutscene called Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm that set the stage for Final Fantasy X-2 that I completly missed until I was a couple hours into the story. It’s in Eternal Calm that you learn that Kimhari found a sphere recording on Mt. Gagazet, and in that recording there’s someone who looks suspiciously like Tidus being held captive. Yuna joins the Gullwings to find more spheres so she can find whoever this person is.
Final Fantasy X-2 is an asset-flip sequel. All the locations are the same from Final Fantasy X, and outside of the 3 main characters, all the old characters that you meet use their old character models. Which is fine, except for when Rikku tries to call Wakka “tubby”, but the character model from Final Fantasy X is jacked. Even worse than that, Lulu is pregnant and gives birth during the story of Final Fantasy X-2, but her character model doesn’t change at all. I appreciate trying to tell a story, but man, those moments made me scratch my head.
Pictured here: 9 month pregnant Lulu
The way Final Fantasy X-2 is structured, is that the airship Celcius is your base of operations. Piloted by Buddy and Brother, you are able to go to any of the locations from Final Fantasy X right from the get go. You want to start your new adventure in Zanarkand? Sure! Why not Djose temple? The game will highlight which locations are required for story progression, but almost every other location holds characters to meet and a side quest for you to explore. Not only does each location have a side quest, but Final Fantasy X-2 is broken into 5 chapters, and most locations have a side quest in each chapter.
On one hand, it’s kind of touching to revisit the old locations. Running across the calm lands, riding scoopufs, visiting the idyllic island of Besaid all evoke strong feelings of nostalgia. I couldn’t help but reflect on my time with the characters in X while playing Final Fantasy X-2. It was kind of fascinating returning to Zanarkand for the first time, and seeing it overrun with tourists. In X it was such a sombre, reverent place and now there’s gobs of people trampling over the places where Yuna laid her life on the line to grant these people their Eternal Calm. But after a couple chapters, I was fatigued. I didn’t want to go back to besaid island for the fourth time, I didn’t care about another trek through the lightning plains.
And I largely didn’t. The save file for Final Fantasy X-2 has a percent completion tracker on it, and I finished the game with about 60% completed. Now, some of those side quests can be kind of funny or sweet, or sometimes will shed a bit more light on certain characters, but at the end of the day it felt like a relentless grind. Running all the way up and down the Mi’ihen Highroad is fine once. Not over and over again.
The plot of Final Fantasy X-2 generally revolves around the actions of two competing factions. New Yevon and The Youth League. New Yevon seeks to maintain the power structure Yevon held in Final Fantasy X, despite the actions of Yuna revealing the corruption within the orginzation. The Youth League, on the other hand seek to uncover the secrets of Spira, including everything Yevon was hiding from the populace. As membership in The Youth League expanded rapidly, they became more hot-headded in their approaches, being openly hostile to anyone defending or even being tangentially related to Yevon, new or old. There was one moment where an NPC basically spat at Yuna and said “the time of the summoners is over. Aeons are gone, Summoners are useless now”, which is a wild thing to say after everything Yuna did for the populace in Final Fantasy X. But then again, I kind of get it. Yevon was a fraud, and the world has fundamentally changed. Still, I was shocked at the lack of reverence for Yuna after she delivered the eternal calm, considering the god-hero status Auron, Jecht, and Braska received after defeating Sin on their pilgrimage.
Because the structure of Final Fantasy X-2 lets you pick and choose which location you want to go to in the order you see fit, the story isn’t as cohesive or punchy as Final Fantasy X. And there’s a lot less of it, too. Each chapter has a handful of cutscenes to move the main plot forward, and you can count the CG cutscenes in the game on one hand. There isn’t an emotional build up throughout the game, instead any emotional moments are kind of built and resolved within their own side-quest encounters. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t hit the same was that Final Fantasy X did.
Basically under Besaid there was a giant machina weapon named Vagnagun, and 1000 years ago some plucky kid from Zanarkand wanted to use to to stop the war between Besaid and Zanarkand so he could save his summoner girlfriend. But they died, executed by firing squad. But their souls remained, and that plucky kid looks kind of like Tidus, which is who Yuna saw in that Sphere that Kimhari gave her to start the game. The leaders from New Yevon and The Youth League try to figure out what to do about Vegnagun, but while they’re standing in the Farplane, Shuyin (the Tidus look-alike) posesses one of the leaders, and takes him and Vegnagun deep into the Farplane, with the other faction leaders following to try and stop it. Without the leaders, the factions begin to fight each other more earnestly.
The Gullwings decide that the only thing that could possible stop the violence is song. So they put on another concert and Yuna unites the factions with a song and dance.
With the factions united, Yuna and group dive deep into the Farplane and meet with the leaders who are at a total loss as to what to do with Vegnagun. Their plan is to force Shuyin out of his current body into Nooj’s body, which they’ve rigged to sacrifice himself to stop Shuyin once and for all.
Yuna says “I don’t like your plan. It sucks.”
Which, to be fair, she would be sensitive to the idea of someone sacrificing themselves. But she suggests “if it’s a machine, we can just take it apart”, and so the Gullwings beat the shit out of this ancient weapon and save the day.
Right from the get-go, Final Fantasy X-2 has a dramatic shift in tone from Final Fantasy X, and that’s communicated immediately with the jpop concert opening. If you come into this game expecting another beautiful, meloncholic story, well, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Final Fantasy X-2 reminds me of all the mediocre fan-fictions I read as a teenager. Taking the characters we fell in love with, sliding in a self-insert, and then going on wacky adventures with little consequence or thought as to the wider world and narrative the original media set. I don’t necessarily hate Final Fantasy X-2’s story, but I certainly don’t respect it the way I respect Final Fantasy X.
Gameplay
Right off the bat Final Fantasy X-2 hits you with the changes to its battle system. The ATB is back, meaning the combat happens in real time. Also, it’s pretty fast paced and chaotic. More than once I’ve lost a character to just some bad timing and me spending just a bit too long drilling into menus trying to find the item that I was looking for.
The real big gameplay element that most of the story focuses on is the Dresspheres, which allow your three characters to change jobs mid-battle. By pressing L1 you pull up a menu and you can swap your job, triggering a magical girl style costume change. After the sparkles settle, the character can then use the skills associated with their new job.
Each character earns skills for each of their jobs individually. Just because Yuna learned all the White Mage Skills doesn’t mean that Rikku and Paine will be any help healing the party. On one hand, I get it, but on the other hand, it’s a tedious ass grind to acquire all the skills for each job for each character. This just naturally pushes each of your characters into archetypes, leaving little reason to have overlap.
The other element to the dress spheres, is the Garment Grids. These Grids are usually fairly circular and have various slots for you to place dress spheres in. The dresspheres you attach to the garment grid is what dictates which classes each character can access during each battle. Thankfully you can put the same dressphere on multiple grids.
Furthermore, most Garment Grids will offer a passive benefit as well, like letting the character cast certain spells no matter which dressphere they’re currently using. This enables a character to pull a little double duty, weilding a damage dealing class, but retaining access to some specific magics. Many Garment Grids have multi-coloured gates that will give a character a bonus if they manage to pass through all the gates. The bonus can be casting a spell for free, or bolstering a specific stat.
The Dressphere and Garment Grid system is pretty cool and unique, and surprisingly deep, but I didn’t actually end up utalitizing it all that much. In general I kept my characters locked to a specific class so I could unlock the high level skills, such as the -aga spells for Yuna as a black mage. But that left all her other classes feeling anemic by comparison, so I never switched her out. That is until I got a garment grid that let me use black manage skills, where I swapped her to a White Mage. Paine, I kept as the basic warrior class until I unlocked the Berserker class, which I switched to, so she could keep her impressive damage up.
Late in the game you can find Lore items, which, when equipped will let you access the skills from other classes. It’s something I wished was available right from the start, and would have encouraged me to shift my classes more frequently, if I could continue to access the skills I’d already earned rather than leaving them behind entirely.
Aesthetically, whenever you switch dresspheres, that character changes their costume too, but only in the battle. In the overworld, the three characters retain their default class costumes. I liked discovering each of the characters costumes, but oh my goodness the fan service was so gratuitous. It felt like every costume has the entire midriff section just clawed away, and the characters loved their booty-shorts and short skirts. Seriously, I felt shame and embarrassment while playing Final Fantasy X-2, to the point where I wouldn’t play it if my wife or daughter were home, lest they ask me why the characters in the game weren’t wearing any clothes
The Thief dressphere is probably the worst offender for skimpy-ness. Unfortunately that’s Rikku’s default costume for the entire game.
Overall, Final Fantasy X-2 is a fairly easy game. Once you lock in your classes and start unlocking their skills, you can cruise through most of the battles. That said, every now and then a ‘normal’ random encounter would KO my entire party. Sometimes, things happen, but overall the random battles were pretty easy.
I did run into some big troubles right at the end of the game when I messed up a final puzzle and didn’t realize you could reset it, so I spent a couple hours grinding levels and skills so I could beat this insanely difficult boss. The challenge with the boss was that he would hit for obscene damage, and healing himself for the same amount of damage, so I had two characters dedicated to healing or maintaining buffs, leaving the third character to be the damage dealer. The downside being that character was only doing 100 to 300 more damage than the boss was healing with every attack, so it was a very slow, attritional battle for me. Oh, and the boss had 144,000 HP. Yes, this battle took me FOREVER.
The upside to grinding up to a point where I could beat this super boss, was that it made the games final boss a cake-walk. It turns out you’re not supposed to beat that super boss, you’re supposed to solve the puzzle, which lets you skip that boss. And I’ll be honest, I ended up grinding my berserker to getting the Eject skill, and then just yeeted that boss right out of the arena. Cheesy, I know, but I hate grinding.
Final Thoughts
Final Fantasy X-2 is one of the rare games in the Final Fantasy franchise that has multiple endings. I got the normal ending with a 56% completion score. I think it would be fun to play through the game again, retaining all the skills and items I earned on my first playthrough, having multiples of each of the dresspheres, and discovering some of the sidequests that I left unfinished. I think that feature makes Final Fantasy X-2 one of the most replayable Final Fantasy games in the franchise.
Unfortunately for me, the plot is disappointing and utterly cheesy, with the power of song and love being the major problem solvers in this story. Further to that, the gratuitous costumes and the grindy nature of the game makes me not want to revisit it again, despite the New Game Plus feature showing up for the first time in franchise history. I was okay with the Normal ending, and I’m at peace looking up the other endings on YouTube.
One of the things I praised Final Fantasy X for, was that it was very easy to play without a guide. I cannot give that same praise to Final Fantasy X-2. So many side quests require perfect knowledge, to hit that 100% completion rating to see the perfect ending is such an exercise in tedium that I cannot be bothered. Not when there are so many other great games out there to explore.
Final Fantasy X-2 is the embodiment of a direct-to-video sequel. It reminds me so much of the Fan-Fictions I used to read and write back in the day. It’s a side-quest filled, asset-flip romp in Spira, with little regard for the themes and gravitas that made the source media so great. It’s the Mulan II of the Final Fantasy Franchise.
Next for me is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a game I’ve played half a dozen times and know that I love. I was going to proceed to Final Fantasy XII, but my friend who is willing to play it alongside me just got Final Fantasy VII:Rebirth, so I’ll hold off on my mainline adventures a little while longer.
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.
dnup (Pronounced Down-Up (Holy cow does it ever feel wrong to not capitalize the name of the game)) is the latest game from Kei Kajino, the designer of the wonderfully brilliant and unique game Scout. dnup also uses the two-cards-in-one concept where a card has one number on one half, and if you flip it upside down, there’s a different number on the other side. But this time there’s no theme. I suspect that after every single review lamented how the circus theme in Scout just didn’t make any sense, he said, “f*** it,” and just made a great new card game.
In dnup, players are trying to lose all the cards from their hand. the twist is kind of the complete inverse of Scout. When you get your hand, you’re allowed to sort your cards, but you may not flip any of them over. On your turn, you perform one action, and then play continues around and around the table until someone has shed all the cards from their hand.
There are four possible actions to choose from. The first is playing a set of cards from your hand to the table. When you do, you must play a number of cards that is unique. That is to say, if someone else already has two cards on the table, you cannot also play a set of two cards unless the value of your pair is higher than theirs. If your value is higher, the player who played the inferior set must pick up their cards. And the golden rule of dnup is that whenever cards are taken off the table and added to a hand, they are always flipped over.
Another action is adding one card from your hand to an existing set on the table. If adding that card would cause the set to match the size of another set already in play, then the set you’re adding to must have a higher value than the existing set. If it does, the player with the lower-valued set must pick up their cards.
The third thing you can do is simply pick up someone else’s set. Just reach across the table, scoop up all the cards, flip them over, and add them to your hand. The last action is flipping over all the cards in your hand.
The last quirk is that if the set of cards you played on your last turn managed to stay on the table the entire time, that is to say that nobody forced you to pick up your set, and no one chose to put it up from you, then before you do your action, you simply discard that set from the game, slowly whittling down the pool of available cards in the round.
Players continue taking a single action each, going around and around the table until someone manages to shed all of their cards. That player earns two points. Play continues until someone else also sheds all their cards, earning one point. The game continues until someone has achieved four points, and then they are the winner of dnup.
I’ve often complained about games that have this handcuffing feeling. Games where you have things you want to do, but you just can’t do them because of various arbitrary restrictions. And I do get that horrible handcuff-y feeling in dnup quite a bit. Like, all I need to do is put my two fives down on the table and I’m out, but someone else played two sixes before me, so now I’m left without any good options.
This is a much bigger issue in much bigger games. I find this feeling in most prevalent in games designed by Alexander Pfister, this feeling just frustrates me to the point where I don’t enjoy the game. Maracaibo and Blackout: Hong Kong come to mind, although it’s been a long time since I played either game, so maybe my memory is getting a bit fuzzy on exactly why I didn’t like those games so much. But now I’m getting a little off topic.
I don’t mind the handcuffing feeling so much here. It is frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but the rounds are also just so short. If you’re a little stuck, you can make a slight pivot by picking up someone else’s cards or flipping your cards over, and then a couple minutes later that round is over anyway. You shuffle up the whole deck, deal out a new hand, and there are really no lasting consequences. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Being handcuffed, not able to act and losing out on winning a hand isn’t the end of the world because there’s more game to play right away. Those handcuffs aren’t holding you back for two and a half hours. It only lasts a couple of minutes.
I initially played the two-player variant of dnup, and I quite enjoyed it. In the two-player game, each player takes two turns in a row, giving you ample opportunity to change and adjust your plans. It lets you work around those handcuffs and gives you a bit more control over your strategy.
In a five-player game, the tempo was a lot more chaotic. A lot more hoping that someone else would beat your set so you could pick up the cards and have them flip around into exactly the right cards you needed. Or hoping nobody else plays a set of three because your three ones are exactly what you need to go out. The game became much more opportunistic and much less predictable the more players you added.
That said, dnup is easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to play. The cards are big and colorful, albeit with no theme attached. That’s not a downside in my book, but overall it doesn’t quite have the same charm as Scout. I’m not sure if I’m not as hooked on dnu[ because Scout was the first game where I encountered cards with two different values on opposite sides, so it felt so fresh and innovative, or if I’m simply missing the novelty of not being able to sort your cards at the start of the round, forcing you to play tactically to collapse runs and sets into useful combinations in your hand. I cannot tell you how much I love that mechanic. I do like the coldness of dnup, the feeling of denying your opponents by sending cards running back to their hands. That direct interaction is absolutely lovely.
In the end, I like dnup, but not as much as Scout. They do feel like quite different games, but I kind of struggle to think of a situation where I would choose to bring out dnup over Scout, other than playing with people who have already played Scout and have heard of dnup, and want to give it a shot. I prefer dnup over Scout as a 2 player game, but I already have a ton of 2 player games that I love to play, and I’m not sure if dnup is going to be able to squeeze its way into that crowded genre.
I don’t think it’s a harsh criticism to say that I don’t like dnup as much as Scout. Scout is one of my favorite card games of the last several years, and dnup is still a clever, fast-playing card game. I enjoyed my plays of it, and I’ll happily play it again. For a mere $18 CAD, it was an easy buy. But I just don’t see it replacing Scout on my shelf or in my heart.
