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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Jambo Jambo Price: £19.99 2 Players, Ages 10+ \'Jambo!\' is the friendly greeting Swahili traders offered their customers in Central Africa before colonization. The players are traders in this day, competing to be the first to earn 60 gold. ********** 2 players, 40 minutes designed by Rüdiger Dorn reviewed by Alan How Jambo is the latest in the highly successful 2 player series from Kosmos. This time the designer is Rüdiger Dorn, who is on a hot streak. So with a great background in 2 player games and a good designer, Jambo should be an instant purchase. The game is produced in the now familiar Kosmos 2 player format and is chock full of bits. Over 100 cards, 50 gold markers and 36 markers neatly fit into the plastic insert. The cards are of excellent quality, as you would expect. The theme is that you are playing a merchant in Central Africa and compete to earn 60 gold by selling 6 different types of commodity. Each player has 5 actions on their turn and these are monitored by the other player. This helps to keep both players involved in the game and, I have found, encourages the active player to get on with the game. Each player has a 6 space market on which to store his commodities and initially these are empty, but your supply of cash will allow you to buy and then sell commodities. Players draw cards from a deck of cards to add to their opening set of cards. The deck is large and contains 4 main types of card: 1) Ware cards that contain blend of commodities, mainly in groups of 3: 2) Utility cards, which provide game bonuses and up to 3 can be retained from turn to turn; 3) People cards which contain actions that the active player takes and then discards the card; and 4) Animal cards, which feature action cards and are played on your opponent. The active player initially decides whether to draw a card from the draw pile (1 action), but if this card isn\'t what you want, you discard the card and then draw another card (another action) until you are satisfied or you have used up your 5 actions. With the balance of your actions, you can then play cards from your hand. The main option is to trade commodity cards. Each of the ware cards shows two numbers - the lower is the cost of buying that set of commodities from the bank and the second is the value of the same set when sold. Since your goal is to increase your starting cash of 20 into 60, you have a lot of trading to complete. Each purchase or sale is an action, so more often you need to store purchased commodities and then recombine these purchases into a sale. Cash flow is important as is managing your storage, so these sub systems have to be administered carefully. Fortunately, one of the cards that you can draw is an extra storage area, which allows you to store a further 3 commodities. But if this was all the game was about, it would feel very similar to trading systems in other games. What transforms Jambo is the variety of cards and their impacts. The utility cards provide you with many options. For example, ``Supplies\'\' gives you the ability to draw cards from the deck until you receive a commodity card. This costs you 1 gold and then you have a better option to buy or sell goods. The downside is that this is an action, but if you combine this with another utility, such as ``Mask of transformation\'\', which allows you to trade a card with the top of the draw deck, you might achieve the desirable goal of buying and selling in the same turn. There is a limit on the number of utility cards that you can retain, but these can be overridden with new ones if they work better for you. You can ``attack\'\' your opponent by playing animal cards. There are only 14 of these in the deck and they can be negated by one of the people cards, but at the appropriate time these cards can damage your opponent\'s position. Finally the people cards provide you with some recourse if your position needs transforming. For example the Shaman allows you to trade all wares of a type for another type, which could allow you to achieve a trade more quickly. It is this use of different cards that makes Jambo an interesting game. It has a feel of Cosmic Encounter in a way because of the combinations of cards and the sequence in which you play them on yourself and your opponent. (This is a good thing for me as I really enjoy Cosmic Encounter.) These options mean that many things can happen but you have to recognise these can be good or bad because of the way the cards are played. Of course this means that you are generally involved in short term planning and reacting to the position you find yourself in. Sometimes this is not a good position and the run of the cards means that you cannot get out of this position while your opponent is doing well. The best thing to do is to recognise that the game does not last long and play another game! I like Jambo mainly because of the options but also because the presentation is also so good and it really does make the game feel enjoyable to play. If you like 2 player card games and have some experience of the Kosmos series, then this is one of the better ones and can be recommended to add value to your collection. 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