If you like cooperative games, forcing you to think, combining and with rules that are accessible to everyone, get to know Jam Good .
About the game
A simple, small box for the game, it mainly contains the letters we need (along with “hooks” for Polish characters), as well as card holders, tokens with numbers from 1 to 8, flower drawings, red and green markers (looking like candy) , and of course – a joker card. In addition, we get a notebook, pencil and even a sharpener!
Even though the rules of the game are straightforward and easy to explain to my teammates, I had to watch the video about the game on YouTube, as not everything was clear to me after reading the manual for the first time.
As I mentioned before, Jam is goodis a cooperative game in which we give word clues, hoping that at the end of the game everyone will be able to decode their letters and guess the secret words that we made up at the beginning of the game. We start by creating a word from cards (five letters in the standard game). We then shuffle it and pass it to the player on the right, making it his puzzle to decode at the end of the game. If there are less than six of us on the team, we use additional card holders as fictional players. This ensures that there will always be six letters on the table for each round, which will help you guess passwords (I can only see five, the sixth – mine, remains invisible to me). The fun is all about giving the right tips. Each participant has to suggest a keyword at least once. The more players it helps to decrypt the password, the better. Whenever we get a clue, we write down the word in a notebook and try to guess what is on the rack.
We can discuss clues among ourselves, but under no circumstances can we speak out loud or suggest a word that is a puzzle to the person on our right. By giving a hint, we can say how many people it will help, how many letters it has and what we use additionally, e.g. a joker. However, the hints are not unlimited. You have to be careful, because each of them costs – minus one candy chip. The game ends when all clue tokens are gone, or when everyone decides they are ready to guess their words.
Impressions
Good Jam uses mechanics found in games such as Hanabi and Scrabble . It is important to play with words. There is a lot of deduction here, some strategy, especially when it comes to giving directions. Although the pace is slow and it is not a crazy party game, it forces the player to think up words intensively in order to – as befits a cooperative game – help other participants as much as possible. The cool thing is that we can choose the difficulty level ourselves by choosing which letters we will guess. You can come back to the game many times, even in the same group, depending on how much words you have in your head 😉
