Jamaica

21st September 2021

It's a Tuesday and I'm at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

In honour of Talk Like A Pirate Day, the first game of the evening was Jamaica, a game of pirate racing.

However, before we move on:
"My wife's gone to the West Indies."
"Jamaica?"
"No, she went of her own accord!"

With that out of the way, let's continue.

---

What's in a game?

• Game board: This colourful board depicts what I guess is a very, very loose representation of Jamaica.
  The sea around the island is broken up into spaces and each space contains one of the following, a number of 'square' symbols for being at sea, a gold coin cost for being at port or a skull cave for being in a pirate liar.
  The final 10 spaces of the board are marked 15, then 10 sequentially down to 2, the 11th final space is marked -2!
  The centre of the board has spaces for the game's dice and treasure cards.
• Treasure cards: There are 12 of these small sized cards, about half of them provide bonus victory points at the end of the game, some are cursed and lose the VPs for the controlling player. Finally, some are powers that give the controlling player some sort of bonus, such as an extra hold space, a reroll in combat, etc.
• Treasure token: Circular card tokens used in conjunction with treasure cards.
• Dice: These 2 normal six-siders are wooden with rounded corners.
• Combat die: This six-sider is numbered 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10, the final face depicts a star symbol. It also is a round-cornered wooden die.
• Ships: There are 6 of these well detailed plastic ship models, one in each player colour.
• Player decks: There are 11 double-length landscape cards in each of these 6 decks in colours that correspond to the player colours.
  Each card shows a symbol in the top 2 corners. The top left symbol applies during the 'day' phase and the top right during the 'night' phase.

---

---

• Player boards: This tile shows the 5 holds that each player has in their respective ships.
• Resources: Jamaica uses 3 types of resource, all of which are represented by card tokens.
  Gold: Round, yellow tokens. Gold is used to pay when stopping at a port.
  Food: These greenish tokens are square. Food is used to feed the crew when at sea.
  Gunpowder: These octagonal tokens are black. Gunpowder is used during combat.
• Compass: This large circular token represents the first player.
• Rulebook: Usually I don't bother mentioning the rulebook but in Jamaica, it's designed to foldout like a treasure map.
  This is in equal measure both clever and frustrating!

The quality of the long player decks is pretty standard, the tokens and tiles are all suitably thick as is the gameboard. The ships a feel sturdy and the wooden dice are particularly nice.
The overall art direction for Jamaica is colourful and makes use of a cartoonish style that suits the game's comical theme. The gameboard is brash with brightly coloured art but the standout are the player decks; not only do they share the board's style, they can be placed side-by-side to create a single long picture.
The game doesn't use much iconography, what there is of it is easy to understand.

---

---

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put all the treasure tokens on to their allotted spaces on the board, then shuffle the treasure cards and remove 3, place the 9 remaining cards in a face-down deck on to their space on the board.
  Put out the dice on their spaces.
• Player decks: Give each player a player deck and put the corresponding ship on to the start/finish space.
  Each player should shuffler their decks into a face-down deck and draw 3 cards.
  Give each player a player board.
• Start player: Determine the start player, who becomes the Captain.

Now we're ready to to begin.

On to play
​In Jamaica, the Captain rolls the dice and assigns them to the game's 2 different phases per turn. Each player then chooses 1 of their 3 available cards to play and then performs the day and night actions on those cards. how effective those actions will be are determined by dice rolled and allocated to day and night.

• Captain rolls: The player who is The captain rolls the 2 normal six-siders, then they assign 1 die to the 'day' phase and the other to the 'night' phase, they are free to consult their hand of cards before doing so.
• Play cards: Once the dice have been allocated to the 2 phases, each player must play one of their 3 available cards face-down in front of them. Once this is done, all cards are revealed.
  Actions: Starting with the captain, who becomes the active player, all players perform their 2 actions. The day action is fully completed first, then the night action is completed.
  There are 2 types of action - movement and loading with a total of 5 different actions.
• Loading: There are 3 loading actions for the 3 types of resource - food, gold and gunpowder, they all function identically.
  The active player loads a number of resources into their hold equal to the dice for that phase. If they are loading food as the night action and the die for the night phase is a 3, then they load 3 food tokens.
  Holds: There are however, some restrictions on loading. Resources must be loaded into empty holds, if the active player has no empty holds then they must discard all the resources from a hold to make room, furthermore, the resource being discarded cannot match the resource being loaded.
• ​Movement: There are 2 types of movement.
  Forward arrow: The green arrow pointing right represents forward movement, this allow the player's ship to move forward a number of spaces equal to the dice on the pertinent space. E.g., if the die on the morning space is a 4 and the played card has a green arrow for the morning action, then they can move forward 4 spaces.
  Back Arrow: The red arrow that points left represents backwards movement. The player must mover their ship backwards a number of spaces equal to the relevant die!
  Stopping: Once a ship has ended its movement, the player must deal with the space they have stopped at, this can be detrimental if player's aren't careful. There are 3 types of space.
  Port: If a player's ship ends movement on a port space, they must pay the cost shown in gold.
  At sea: If the player's ship ends movement on a space where they are at sea, indicated by the squares, they must pay the cost in food.
  Can't pay: In either instance above, if they active player cannot pay the cost of the space they have ended movement on, they must move their ship backwards until they land on a space where they can pay the cost, or on to a pirate lair where there is no cost, see below for more info.
  If a ship does not move this turn because they played a card with 2 load actions, then they do not have to pay any cost.
  Pirate lair: If player stops at a pirate lair and there's a treasure token there. They can discard the token to draw a treasure card. If the token here has already been taken then nothing happens. In both situations there's nothing to pay.
  Combat: What happens if a ship moves on to the same space as another ship, glad you asked; see below.
• Combat: When a ship moves on the same space as another ship, then combat ensues!
  The player who moved on to an already occupied space is considered the attacker, the player who was already there is the defender.
  The attacker decides how many gunpowder tokens they want to commit, rolls the combat die and adds the 2 values together, this is their combat strength.
  The defender then decides how many gunpowder tokens to commit and rolls the combat die, adding the 2 values together to generate their own combat strength.
  Whoever has the highest combat strength; wins (See below)! In the case of a draw, nothing happens.
  Star: If the star result is rolled, it can dramatically change the outcome of combat.
  If the attacker rolls the star, they immediately win the combat, the defender doesn't even get to roll!
  If the defender rolls the star, then they win the combat regardless of the attackers combat strength.
  The winner: The winner of combat may chose 1 of the following 3 actions.
  Take resources: They winner may take all the contents from one of the loser's holds.
  Plunder treasure: the winner may take one of the loser's face-down treasure cards.
  Curses: The winner may give one of their cursed face-down treasure cards to the loser, curses indeed!
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, play progresses to the player to their left until all players have completed their actions. All players draw another player card and the compass token moves 1 player to the left and a new round begins.

​
Endgame
Play continues until a ship reaches the start/finish, upon which the current turn is completed and the game goes to scoring. There are 4 sources of scoring.
Players score points according to where their ship finished, the start/finish scores 15 and points go downwards from there. If a ship failed to pass the -5 space, then they lose 5 points.
Every gold token a player has on their player board scores a points.
Treasure cards score their points and cursed treasure cards deducts from the player's score.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

---

---

Overall
In Jamaica, players must balance the need to load resources with the need to move along the game track, doing too much of one or the other will probably be detrimental. They'll need to judge when it's the right time to move with the right amount of resources. The rules limiting how players fill their holds forces players to make decisions about what they carry on their ships.
Players will also need to mitigate bad rolls and unfavourable cards, e.g., playing a red arrow backwards move when the die shows a 1.

At the same time it's also a good idea to keep an eye out for other players. If another player is 3 spaces away and one of the dice rolled a 3, there's always the risk that opponent will end moving on to your space, provoking a fight, which could prove costly. Perhaps it might be a good time to load some gunpowder...

Obviously, all of this is to some extent is influenced by the dice rolls, having all the gold in the world wont help if a player can't reach a port! It means players will need to adapt to this randomiser and change strategies when the dice - and sometimes the captain don't give player the results they need.

Jamaica is a cheerfully colourful game with fairly light programming game where players 'only' have to think 2 moves ahead, with a theme that fits well with the mechanics. Jamaica also has elements of resource management and a touch of player interaction and conflict. It's an easy to learn programming game that is fun to play, particularly if you like a little bit of jostling between players and generally presents them with meaningful choices to make.