Jumanji (1995), aka What Just Happened?

I got the Jumanji game a few weeks back and we finally got to give it a spin.  Sure, I had heard over on BoardGameGeek that it had some logical flaws, but it was a real head scratcher.  It succeeded at being entertaining, sure, so it gets points for that.  But it only had about four simple rules, and they conflicted with each other every step of the way.

So, you roll a d8 and move on the board.  Points for choosing a d8, that's just a little different.  It actually comes with five d8s, one of them plain and the other four with special labels on every side, which apparently you get to DIY when you first play the game.  And the game board is a massive, solid piece of work, kudos to the designers.  

The main game mechanic is that if you land on a blank space you draw a card and put it in the little red bubble to make the message readable -- that was a thing in the mid-80s and there was even a D&D module that had clues encoded that way.  So you get a funny phrase like in the movie.  Most of them were failed attempts at poetry but a few of them were clever or good for a chuckle.  Each card also has a symbol and a number on it.  Now, by the rules, you would flip over the 8 second hourglass and all other players roll their special 8-sided die as many times as they can before the sand runs out.  The idea is to roll the symbol shown on the card to "rescue" the player who drew the card.

We knew that was going to suck before we even tried it.  We were just two players, so only one of us would be rolling to rescue the other each time, and we loathe dexterity and speed tricks.  So, seeing how it came with four of these specially labeled 8-sided dice we figured "screw the hourglass, we'll just roll these four dice and either the symbol comes up or it doesn't."  Faster results, far less neurotic.

So if "all players" roll the symbol, then they all move the spaces shown by the number on the card, and the card is discarded.  If not all players roll the symbol, the player who drew the card goes back the number of spaces shown on the card and the card gets added to the Disaster panel, which can hold a total of 10 cards and the game is over if that fills up before anyone gets to the center.

That's most of the game.  But there's this rhinoceros, see?

About one in five spaces on the board has a rhino on it.  And if you land there you get to drop the plastic rhino figure in front of some other player, and they can't move until they roll and even number, because apparently rhinos are afraid of even numbers.

Now, if you fail to roll an even number, you still have to pick a card AND move back one, AND the rhino follows you as you move backwards because they are oh so brave when no even number is showing.  That's cute, I guess.

The only other feature is a set of four circled parts of the boards called Jungle spaces, where you need an opponent to roll an hourglass or you can't roll your movement die (you stay they and pick another card).  There are a few spaces called "5 or 8" which we flat out could not make sense of.  Save them for later.  We would probably just ignore them in future games because they were so broken.

But ... and with a rhino in the game, you should be expecting a big butt.  If you rescue someone and get to move forward a few spaces, it doesn't say you can't jump over the rhino.  And if you're stuck on a Jungle space and haven't been able to move in six turns, you want to get good at rescuing people so those forward movements get you out of the jungle.  Yay.

Neither conflict is even mentioned in the rules.  The first game was a train wreck and we almost gave up.  The next few games, once we saw that the rescues let you advance, ended up as pretty quick wins.

But what is that "5 of 8" space supposed to do?  In the first game I figured it meant that you have to roll a 5 or 8 to move forward, but no, actually, the player to your left has to roll a 5 or 8 so that you can move, and if they fail, you both move back one, and then your would-be rescuer needs rescuing by the player on THEIR left.  But with only two players you just take turns rolling the d8 and failing an moving backwards, possibly with a rhino on your ass ... all the way back to the start if needed.

So we have to rule that the start space doesn't count as a space, so if you're stuck their with a rhino in your face you don't have to draw cards and fail and go into negative land.

Did they even playtest this thing?

As far as we could tell, it did not say you had to pick a card if you landed on a rhino or "5 or 8" space, and there were enough disasters on the regular spaces, so no, we didn't volunteer to take more cards.  After the third game, we saw that the hourglass symbols on the icon dice were meant to be a wild card, so rescuers have the roll the symbol OR an hourglass, to which my instinct said that would be way too easy, only to see the very last blurb in the rules saying that for two-player games the hourglass was NOT wild.  Instinct was right again.

About the cards and the red decoder strip -- you can just about read the blue text without putting the cards in the decoder, and how it actually played out was, I would read each card the first time we saw it, and after that I could read the symbol and number without the decoder, so the cards would come up as, "It's the elephant, you need a door for some reason, or go back three spaces."

This game forces you to come up with new rules every couple of turns to cover all the combinations of malarkey, and I think that after five or six playthroughs each household could have its own wacky fun version of their own.  I saw some alternate rules on BoardGameGeek, so some clever solutions are available.