Kulkmann's G@mebox - www.boardgame.de

Jungle Race

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Authors:
Simone Luciani

Publisher:
Cranio Creations
2018

No. of Players:
2-6

EVALUATION

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G@mebox author Marco Klasmeyer writes about the game:

This cute children's card game takes you to the Jungle. Five animals make a race in their crazy vehicles. Rabbit, Gorilla, Giraffe, Turtle and Elephant are fighting for the leading position. It is a reckless overtaking, but who drives to risky will lose the pole position and starts again at the end. But only the first 3 of 5 positions score, the race has just started.

The little card game comes in a small box and consists of 5 route cards, 50 pilot cards (10 for each pilot), 33 medal coins and finally the 5 famous pilot shapes in a plastic support. Each of the 2-6 players obtains 7 pilot cards to play one round of the game. A pilot card dejunglerts one of the 5 pilots. The 5 route cards are laid out in a row, a pilot vehicle with its driver is placed on each card, the order does not matter.

All players commonly participate at the race, but no one takes the role of a special pilot. During a player's turn he plays one of his cards or passes and thus quits his round. The played pilot card moves the corresponding pilot and his vehicle one position further thus overtaking the vehicle in front of him. If the pilot card displays the pole position vehicle, this pilot drives to risky and must move to the end of the queue - bad luck. All other pilots advance one position in this case. The played card remains visible in front of the player. Then the next player in clockwise order proceeds in the same manner until all players pass or do not have any cards in their hand anymore. The race round ends in this case and the evaluation phase is entered in which the scores for this round of the race are determined: Each player compares his cards (face up in front of him or still hidden in his hand) with the first three positions of the vehicle race. He scores 3 points multiplied by the number of his matching cards for the first position and 2 respectively 1 point(s) for the second and third position. The player receives the corresponding value in medal coins. The fourth and fifth positions do not score. After the round has been evaluated, the cards are shuffled and distributed again (7 per player) for the next round. The positions of the vehicles remain unchanged. The game ends after 3 rounds and the player with the most medal coins wins.

The quite simple game mechanism that all players can move any pilot yields many funny and exciting situations where players swap vehicle positions back and forth again and again. A player can only score with the pilot cards he has obtained at the begin of a round. No cards can be exchanged nor drawn or discarded. Thus each player tries to keep the pilots of the majority of his cards in the first 3 winning positions to gain the most score points and obtain more medal coins. Sometimes several players benefit from the same pilot cards but in other cases some players will not share the same preferences but the opposite instead. Especially the ability to put the first place back to the end of the queue and shifting all other vehicles can really screw up a winning strategy. The two only possibilities - play a card or quit the round - yield a quick card play (no deep thought strategy) and is extremely suitable for playing many races after each other. The game is well balanced between randomness and interaction, you cannot really fail, there is always a chance to improve and score a bit. The cards and pilots are designed with funny and joyful junglertures, especially for children.

My kids and I renamed the game for ourselves "Go Turtle, go!", as we had that one game where the pilot Turtle was pushed by every player and boosted two times from back to front of the race queue in a reckless overtaking cascade, which is strange and funny at the same time. We never played a single game of jungle race, it took us at least 4 or more games before we could stop. This game is real fun and if you like small quick card games you should not miss this one.


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