Jaipur

The box is the size of a paperback and weighs about as much. That’s the first thing I noticed, back when I was deciding what to carry up in June, and it’s still the reason this one’s stayed in the cabin all five seasons instead of getting rotated out. Sixty-some cards, a handful of wooden camel tokens, some cardboard chips for the goods. No board to speak of, just a market row of face-up cards between you and whoever you’re playing with. Up here that’s usually nobody, but this one needs exactly two, no more, no fewer, so on the rare weekend a smokejumper or a hiker with sense enough to bring their own chair stops by, this is what comes out.

The mechanics are simple enough to teach in under a minute. Take goods from the market, sell goods for money, or trade a handful of your goods for a handful of the market’s. You’re building sets of the same commodity to sell for points, and the trick is the market always has five cards in it and camels are goods too, worthless on their own but useful for hoarding the herd and swapping big. The tension is all in timing. Sell diamonds too early and you get less than the guy who waited. Wait too long yourself and someone else clears the market first and you’re left holding cloth nobody wants that round. Rounds end fast, when either the goods deck runs dry or three of a certain token type get claimed, so you’re never sitting through a slow one.

What I like about it, playing it two-player specifically, is that there’s no bluffing and no hidden hand to manage, just a shared market both of you can see and react to. It plays fast, ten, fifteen minutes a round, best of three, and it rewards paying close attention to what the other person’s been passing up rather than what they’ve been taking. That’s a kind of reading I get plenty of practice at up here anyway, just applied to smoke instead of spice cards.

The components have held up fine. Cardboard’s a little soft from humidity some seasons, the kind of damp that gets into everything by August, but nothing’s delaminated and the camel tokens are chunky enough I haven’t lost one off the table onto the floorboards, which given the gaps in those floorboards is saying something.

Only real knock is that it’s strictly two-player, so if I ever get an actual season with company more than a night, it sits in the drawer. That’s not really a flaw in the game. It’s a flaw in my guest list.