Jatra
Themed around nostalgia for your childhood, Upar Ek's Jatra looks on the face of it to be a simple set collection game where the 3–5 players are picking up a card each turn from an adjacent pile in a 3 x 3 grid. Appearances can be deceptive...
For starters, the four different colours of collectible sets are each treated differently. Toy cards are collected by each player separately but a Ride card is placed between the player who picks it up and the player who has the next turn. Spectacle cards are shared among all the players and when you pick up a Food card you match it with a Shared Food card which you must hand to another player of your choice. Raffle cards aren't collected at all but they have a special effect.
There's more to Divij Ingale's design. You play the game over a series of rounds and the game is won by the first player to complete five successive 'stage' requirements. For example, Stage 1 is to have three sets of two cards. As soon as a player announces that they meet their stage requirement the other players have one turn to do likewise so that they can move on to the next stage. Any that fail remain on the same requirements. Since the stages become steadily harder, this creates an inbuilt catch-up mechanic; in our plays at Board's Eye View players that had lagged behind almost always completed their easier stage in the next round.
And not all of the cards are what they seem. Tho' most have flipsides that match their backs, almost a quarter of the cards in the collectible colours represent grey memories in place of the brightly coloured collectibles. These are treated differently depending on the stage on which you are working. In stage 1, they are simply discarded, so in effect you just have an unproductive turn. In stage 2 you additionally miss your next turn and in stage 3 you must take a further turn to discard the grey card. At stage 4, these cards are even more costly because they force you discard all the cards of their matching suit. Paradoxically, for stage 5 the memory cards become positive because they can be used as part your sets.
We weren't overly enamoured with the different ways of treating the grey cards. It's pure chance whether or not the card you pick up is a grey memory card. We didn't mind so much the stage 1 unproductive turn effect but the other effects seemed disproportionately punitive for something over which players have no agency. If the high luck factor doesn't overly bother you, there's much to commend this game and the tactics involved in knowing that the card you take influences the choices in the grid available to the next player, plus the fact that, for most sets, other players can benefit as much as or more than you from the cards you take.
