Sometimes, too much theme is not a good idea. Jamaica’s rulebook looks and functions literally like a treasure map – complete with arrows leading to different “islands” of rules and all. Amusing for a few seconds – until you realize that in a rulebook, you’re looking for succinctness, clarity, flow, good organization, and maybe a bit of humor, history, and flavor – as appropriate. Not to mention the lack of practicality of unfolding a huge piece of paper to do a quick rule check… Luckily, it is a fairly straightforward family-style game. We played it with 3, but Jamaica is probably more fun with more players – perhaps the full 6 which it supports.
Just One is always a good time. It’s a thoughtful co-op game about giving one-word clues while avoiding matching with others’ (matches are eliminated), and then having someone guess a word from the resulting set of clues. It makes you feel clever when you come up with something informative and unique. We thought we were going to ruin our perfect streak, but someone impressively guessed the correct word from the clues shown in the picture below, even after his initial reaction of “these words don’t fit together” – only to narrowly miss the last 2 words of the game. Can you guess the word? Leave a comment below.
