Jungle game: a relative of Stratego

For the Memorial Day weekend, I grabbed a copy of "the Jungle game" from an eBay seller.  This is a game that is often quoted as being a precursor to Stratego, and the similarities are obvious.  There are pieces with values from 1 to 8 on a board with two big impassable ponds in the middle.  But that's about it.  In Jungle, the pieces start off at fixed locations as shown on the board, and their values are always visible.  In Stratego, you choose where to place all your pieces and you don't know which piece you're attacking until it's too late -- unless you saw the piece before and have a really good memory.  In Jungle, you try to get a piece to a specific space behind the enemy lines, but in Stratego you avoid bombs and try to capture the flag without knowing where it is at the start of the game.

After the frustration in previous posts about the faulty, fabricated history of various games, I'm not going to go into all the stories about this game.  Let's just play it.

All pieces move just one space vertically or horizontally, with just two exceptions: the rat can move through water squares, and the two big cats can leap over ponds entirely.  The goal is to get any of your pieces into the opponent's Lair space.  The three spaces around the Lair are the Trap spaces, and any piece on those spaces has a value of zero.  You're not allowed to put a piece in your own lair space.  Pieces can capture opponent pieces of equal or lesser values, with the rat (1) being able to capture the elephant (8) as well.  And that's about it for rules.

At first, it felt a bit dull: slow movement, and a lot of uncertainty.  But it wins points for simplicity.  We wasted a lot of turns trying to capture pieces, but that's not the actual goal of the game.  By the third game, some interesting game logic came to light.

The initial setup is very well balanced.  You can't just push your elephant (8) straight ahead and take everything in its path, because the first thing in its path is the mouse, the only piece that can take it.  I scored a quick win in one game by getting a big cat (6 or 7) up to the pond and jumping across and making a run for the lair.  But their 8 can block your 7 and their 7 can block your 6.

By then, we realized that the Trap spaces were the key to the game.  You need to keep pieces next to the trap spaces, so if the opponent gets any pieces into that area, they must enter a trap space, become a zero, and be taken by any of your defending pieces.  So, to break through, you have to spend turns clearing away the defenders while trying to protect your own lair.

We couldn't quite work out the logistics of the mouse vs elephant.  The mouse can't get next to the elephant without being taken by the elephant on the next turn.  And a rule says that the mouse can't attack from a water space, blocking the only option that makes sense.  The rule card says "The elephant (8 strength) crushes the rat (1 strength) when it attacks.  But when the rat attacks the elephant, the rat has the advantage and eliminates the elephant!"  Maybe it's saying that if the elephant attacks the rat BOTH pieces are eliminated? 

It's a neat little game which seems casual enough at first, but does clearly have a layer of strategy behind it.  I chose this edition because it was small (about the size of a thick paperback book) and cheap ($9) but the animal pieces were more attractive to me than some of the more expensive sets.  It's all just cardboard and the game board doesn't unfold entirely flat, so it's a bit annoying to have to hold it flat with one finger.  But it gets interesting enough to no longer notice that fault.

We enjoy trying out new things, but can't spend a fortune on this hobby, and don't have the space for hundreds of full sized games.  In fact, we will be selling off a bunch of the ones that I wrote about here.  Every now and then we look at the stack and ask whether it's a game we would want to play again; if not, we'll get them moved along to other gamers.

This one is a keeper.