Jamaica Board Game Review

Setting: Jamaica, 1675.

After a long career in piracy, Captain Henry Morgan skillfully gets appointed to be Governor of Jamaica, with the explicit order to cleanse the Caribbean of pirates and buccaneers. Instead, he invites all of his former “colleagues” to join him in his retirement, to enjoy the fruits of their looting with impunity. Each year, in remembrance of the “good old days,” Morgan organizes the Great Challenge, a race around the island, and at its end, the Captain with the most gold is declared Grand Winner.

And with that, in the board game Jamaica you and your friends are set to race around the island of Jamaica, capturing treasure, battling your opponents, and trying to be the first one back to Port Royal!

Do you have what it takes to make it at sea?

How to play Jamaica

As you might expect in a pirate game, the goal in Jamaica is to gain the most gold. Players are awarded different amounts of gold depending how far away they are from the finish line when the game ends. They’ll also be getting gold along the way by searching for treasure and stealing gold from other pirate ships.

To begin, each player places their ship at Port Royal, gets a cargo hold board, and takes the deck of cards matching their color. The 9 treasure tokens are placed on each skull around the board to represent the buried treasure. Players shuffle their deck, draw 3 cards for their hand, and they’re ready to play.

The game play in Jamaica is very straightforward.

Actions

The start player takes the Compass tile, becomes the Captain, and rolls the 2 dice. They choose one result to represent the morning action and one to be the evening action. They place the dice as such in the Navigation area and all players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and place it face down in front of them.

Then, in turn order, starting with the Captain, each player reveals their card and takes both actions.

While the artwork on every card is awesome, the things that matter for taking actions are the icons that appear in the upper left and upper right corners. The upper left represents the morning action and the upper right represents the evening action.

Green arrow: move forward that many spaces.
Red arrow: move backward that many spaces.
Food: add that many food tokens to one open cargo space on their board.
Cannon: add that many cannon tokens to one open cargo space on their board.
Gold: add that many gold tokens to one open cargo space on their board.

When loading cargo, if all holds already have something in them, the player must empty 1 hold to make room.

When moving, if the final space is a port space, the player must pay that many gold tokens from their cargo board to the bank. And if the final space is a sea space, the player must pay that many food tokens. If the final space is a treasure space and the token is still there, they discard the token and take the top card of the treasure deck–which may be gold, special powers, or cursed treasure.

Shortages

If a player can’t pay the full cost of their final space, they have a Shortage. In which case they must first pay all they can of that resource and then roll the Shortage die. They move backward to the nearest space indicated on the die–either a port (circle), sea space (square), or treasure space (skull and bones). When going backward due to a shortage, they don’t have to pay for the final space landed on.

Battles

When a player’s final space already contains a ship, they must first Battle before paying anything for the space.

When battling, the attacker (player that just arrived) can choose to spend any number of cannon tokens from their hold. Then they roll the Battle die. Their final result is the number on the die plus any cannon tokens they spent. The defender then chooses to spend cannon tokens from their holds and rolls the die. The final results are compared and the higher amount wins (with a tie, nothing happens).

The winner (either attacker or defender) chooses one of the following as a reward:

Steal the contents of one of the holds from their opponent.
Steal a face up or face down treasure card from their opponent.
Give a cursed treasure card (negative points) to their opponent.

Once all players have taken their turn, players all draw another card to bring their hand back up to 3 and the Compass tile is passed to the player on the left who becomes the next Captain. The Captain starts another round by rolling the 2 dice and placing them on the board as the results for the morning and evening actions.

Game End

When a player reaches Port Royal, they stop there. If it’s during their morning action, they don’t take their evening action. Players then complete the current round and total up their gold points as follows:

The white (or red) number on the space where their ship currently is.
The total amount of gold in their holds.
Any treasure cards granting gold.
Minus any cursed treasure.

The player with the most gold points is the winner!

Can the whole family enjoy Jamaica?

Jamaica is a very fun board game for families to enjoy playing together!

It’s a light race game with simple choices to make. However, since players are battling and stealing from each other, it may lead to some hurt feelings. (But no worse than sending someone back to their start space like in the classic board game, Sorry.)

We also love the simultaneous choosing of cards each round. One player rolls the dice and then everyone chooses the card they want to play with those dice results. Then the first player takes their actions and the rest follow suit. It makes rounds go by quickly and also makes for a lot of second-guessing.

Unless you’re the first to go in a round, the other players may do things you don’t expect and it may mess up your plans. For example, you may choose to sit still and just add food and gold to your holds. But then someone after you moves into your space, battles you, and steals your just-acquired gold!

While there are many options, each player only has 3 cards in their hand each round. So your choices do have a limit. Plus, you’re beholden to the dice rolled and the way the Captain places them on the board. So you must make your best choices based on the number results set out by the Captain.

It’s actually a fun way to have a race.

What can stink though is when you run into shortages. Spending all of that resource and then moving backwards is tough to take. Because then you’re down resources plus further behind.

Yet, it doesn’t mean you’re completely out of the game yet either–because everyone has the same limited amount of action cards in their decks too. So while someone may burst ahead at the start, it’s only because they have good movement cards to use. Pretty soon, they’ll only have resource cards in their hand to choose from and will be sitting in a space loading for a bit while you catch up with movement (and battles).

And we like that ebb-and-flow in Jamaica. You just never know what might happen next.

We also really love that up to 6 players can join in the fun. It’s a bit more chaotic with a full 6 players, but that’s also when more unexpected stuff happens. The game can also be played with just 2 players and a ghost ship.

What’s new in the latest edition of Jamaica?

Space Cowboys and Asmodee published a new version of Jamaica just a few weeks ago (Nov 2021) and we’ve given it a spin.

Here’s what the press release said about the new version:

“The Space Cowboys edition of Jamaica gets the classic “square format” box and a revised price, marking it as a gateway game as it should be. Art and materials keep the same quality as the original version. The rules have been slightly altered and streamlined and are set in a new format (classic booklet) with colored side tabs for ease of reference.”

We have the original version of Jamaica plus the expansion, The Crew. So we were happy to take a look at the new version of the game.

The new square box is the first noticeable difference. We really like this more than the original rectangular box because it fits on our game shelf more nicely with all our other games. To fit into a square box, the game board shrank every so slightly. The game also comes with an awesome insert to hold everything nicely in place if stored on end (which we do).

As mentioned in the press release, the rule book is much improved. The original had a fun way of folding out like a treasure map to keep with the pirate theme but really wasn’t very useful that way. It made it hard to read while sitting and hard to find an item in the rules if you wanted to check something.

The new rulebook in booklet form is fantastic and having labeled tabs is genius!

It makes it so easy to turn to the exact page you want without having to rifle through many pages. If you want to see how to do Combat, just grab the tab and easily flip to that page. It now makes me wish all game publishers start using tabbed rulebooks for future game!

We were also very happy to see that the artwork is all the same awesome artwork!

The cards in each players deck still build out to complete a full piratical scene when set end to end. And such art really does add to the fun of the game.

So far, all the changes we’ve mentioned are somewhat cosmetic. And really that is the bulk of the changes. However, there is also one change in the game play in the new version and it has to do with Shortages.

In the original, when a player had a Shortage, they had to pay all they could of that resource and then move backwards to the next space that they could fully pay for. Then they had to pay the full cost of that space too. It hurt. And if you’d run out of everything in your holds, you had to move back to a pirate lair space (because those don’t have a cost).

In the new version, you pay what you can and then you roll the shortage die and move back to the space showing on the die (port, sea, or pirate lair). Plus, you don’t have to pay for the new space. Whew.

We really like the new way shortages are handled.

The long and short of it is that if you already have Jamaica, you don’t need to worry about getting the new version. (Though we do recommend you start using the new Shortage rules by getting a marker and adding the circles, squares, and skull to the Combat die.)

And if you don’t yet have Jamaica, it’s high time you grabbed a copy for your family!

How does Jamaica score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Jamaica scores high on our “let’s play again” game meter because of the fun and light piratey race it is.

The game turns and rounds go by quickly with the simultaneous choosing of cards and quick actions. The parts that take the most time in a round are the battles because players must choose how many cannon tokens to add then roll the dice. But everyone is interested in the outcome of those rolls, so the interest around the table remains fixed.

There are enough twists and turns that you can’t quite predict the outcome until it happens. And then those who didn’t make it to the end are ready to reset the pieces and race again.

We definitely recommend Jamaica for your next family board game!