Jewels
- Board's Eye View
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Rubies, sapphires, emeralds & amber... In Jewels, from GDM, the 2-4 players are jewellers fashioning rings, earrings, bracelets and necklaces from glittering precious stones. Well, not so much precious stones as translucent dice... Jewels is a dice drafting game. Designed by Ignasi Ferré, it's a light, family-friendly game that's played over nine or ten rounds, depending on the number of players.
There are four colours of dice and, each round, you roll the number of dice of each colour equal to the number of players. You group them by number and players take turns to draft all the dice with the same number. When all have drafted, players take turns allocating one or more of their dice to one of the jewellery cards on display. At this stage the numbers on the dice are irrelevant; it's only the colours that matter. The cards all require 1-4 'jewels' to be completed but it is only the player who places the last jewel who scores the card... That means success in this game is as much about timing as about drafting the right dice. In making your decision about which dice to place where you'll want to have an eye on what colour dice rival players still have available.
If you end the round with exactly one unused die (typically because there are no slots left on cards for a 'jewel' of that colour) you can allocate it to one of the four spots on your workbench that give you an enhanced ability in the next round. These variously give you advantage in the drafting phase or in allocating dice to cards; for example, one spot turns the die you place on it into a wild die that can ignore the colour requirements for a jewel. You have to be careful tho' if you're banking on gaining one of the workbench abilities: they can only be claimed for a solitary die; if you find you end the turn with more than one unused dice then these are just discarded without any benefit or compensation.
There's more. There are objective cards that can be claimed by the first player to complete their requirements. These are worth an additional 5 points and will either be for having scored jewellery of a particular type or with a set number of dice of a particular colour. The jewellery cards show different grades of gold for their settings and these generate further end-game set collection bonuses for having multiple different jewellery types in the same grade of gold. Having, for example, one of each of the four types of jewellery in the same class of gold, and all having one colour of jewel in common, will score you an additional 8 points in addition to the score for the individual cards. The end-game set collection scoring can make it very worthwhile to focus on completing sets in the same metal. Similarly tho', you can expect competitive players to engage in 'hate drafting' to try to deny you cards that let you complete a set...
With Jewels, GDM have put together a very attractive package. In addition to the 40 translucent dice, the cards and the chunky dual-layer player boards that you flip at the end to turn into score boards, Jewels comes with its own dice tray. There's also a massive 'diamond' that functions as the first player marker. If it were real it would give the Cullinan 'Star of Africa' a run for its money! Our one gripe is that, in some lighting conditions, it can be difficult to distinguish the different grades of gold depicted on the cards.
Jewels is an easy-to-play drafting game. The rules are largely intuitive, which, along with its attractive presentation and accessible theme, makes Jewels a good candidate as a 'gateway' game for introducing new players to modern board games. It's playable as a two-player game but, for us, it's best with three or four players. In any event, the game plays in around 30 minutes.
