How To Play Jump Drive

In Jump Drive you are racing to a point total, generally 50 points, in your empire. Each round you are gaining cards and then playing out cards to build out your space empire. These cards are split into two categories, planets and technologies. Both of them are going to give you more income, cards, and points possibly from playing them. And all of this is done simultaneously.

Turns

On your turn you pick up to two cards to play from your hand. You play either a technology or planet card or you play both. But to play a card you need to have enough other cards in your hand to discard to play them. If you play one card, either a technology or a planet and not two, you draw a card to add to your hand.

If you don’t have enough cards in hand to play a card you can choose instead of explore. When you explore you draw a number of cards to your hand and then discard so you add two new cards to your hand. The number of cards you draw varies depending on how many eye symbols, explore symbols, you have on your cards already in play.

One last thing about the rounds is military. There are military planets that you can conqueror with your military force in the game. Unlike planets where you gain them peacefully, you don’t need to discard cards are for gaining a military planet. Instead, you need to have enough strength in military in play to conqueror them.

Between Turns

Once you play out your planet and technology two things happen. Firstly, you gain points. You gain points for the total number of points that your empire is generating. That means points that you gained from this round and previous rounds.

The other thing is that you gain cards. Like I said, each planet and technology has two main stats. One being your victory points mentioned above. The other is your card draw. Like victory points, you look at your total card draw and draw that many cards into hand. Now, you only are allowed to have 10 cards in your hand at the start of your turn. So if you draw a greater number than that, you discard down to 10 cards.

You continue with this loop of turn and between turn until someone reaches or surpasses the point goal for the game. If multiple players pass on the same turn, which can happen with the simultaneous play, the player with the most points is the winner of the game.

What Doesn’t Work

There is a decent chunk of luck in the game. Now I say that, I think there are some ways that you can work around it and you always have something to do. But if you don’t draw planets and technology that work with the engine that you started, you might need to pivot hard and fast. And even if you do that, it might be too late in the game as the game normally lasts between 6-8 rounds.

The amount of satisfaction from building up your engine is sometimes cut short as well. You might be looking at building out a great engine, but because of the point total is not that high, your engine might just start really working and then the game ends. I think if you want you can play higher, but it still is going to go by very quickly.

What Works

The speed of the game is impressive. Each turn and decision is meaningful. But because of how it limits the number of cards you have in hand, it is limited in what you can do. So I like that the game is very fast. Now that is a negative if you want to build up a great engine. But I like that you play once and it is very easy to shuffle up and play again.

I like set-up for the game. It is just cards and some tokens for points. So it is super fast to the table. And that is going to make it easier to keep around. Now it is even faster on BGA with your turns and figuring everything out. But it is not a game where BGA is doing a ton of heavy lifting getting it to the table, like some others. But instead, this is a very easy and fast game to table in person.

Engine Building

The engine building element is solid in Jump Drive as well. Now, that is the whole game, you build up your engine. And you decide how quickly you pivot from cards/income to points in the game. And you need to do so quite quickly. But if you want to play a game that is just engine building, this is going to work really well for you.

I also like the early game in this a lot. That is where the biggest strength and decision space for the engine building comes in. You need to figure out how to get your engine up and running extremely quickly. If you need to explore a round, it should be in the first two rounds. If you explore after the first two rounds, you might find that you fall too far behind.

Solo Campaign

Finally, I like the solo campaign. Mainly because it is giving you different goals to shoot for in each version of the campaign. It is not super complex, everything you do is pretty easy to keep track of, but it is different each game. Is it much of a campaign, no. But it is a good way to make it into a solo game versus just see how high a score you end up with in seven rounds. It is fun to add just a little bit of extra to what you are doing.

Who Is Jump Drive For?

This is a good filler engine building game. I don’t think it is going to be a game to build your game night around. But I think it is a solid game for when you want a filler game that does a bit more. Often times with a filler game the decision space is very limited. Here is it is pretty limited but not completely limited and what you decide matters. And because it is so fast, it fits in as a filler or a game you play two times in a night. So if you want a filler game with a bit more to it, I think that is a game that can work well.

Final Thoughts and Grade on Jump Drive

Now, I say it in the video, I might sell my physical copy. That is not because I don’t like the game, I think it is fun. But it is so fast solo and asynchronously on BGA, that I might just play it there. But I also think I have a few people I game with who might enjoy the game. So that might keep it around. And I like that even with the expansion is fits in a small box so that means that it takes up less shelf space.

Now, the downside to the game is that sometimes you just end up with a bad game. I mentioned it in what doesn’t work. And it is generally the combination of two things. It is that you have a bad game. But it is also then that someone has a great game. So while you end up with 10 points after six rounds, someone else is past 50 because they got what they needed. This is sometimes frustrating, in a BGA tournament for example, but generally I find it okay because it is so fast to play that I just play again. So for that reason, that luck is a not a big deal to me.

My Grade: B-
Gamer Grade: C+
Casual Grade: B+
Strategy (out of 10): 5
Luck (out of 10): 6

Now, just a note on luck. I mention twice how it can bite you. Once in my thoughts and once in what doesn’t work. But I only give it a 6 out of 10 for luck. The reason is you need to pivot and sometimes it won’t work. But the option to pivot helps negate some of that luck.

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How to Play Fromage

Fromage is a cheese placement game. You want to place out cheese every turn to score you the most points that you can. But there are certain rules as to how you can place out your cheese. And that’s where some of the strategy of the game comes in. But let’s dive into the basics of it first.

Placing Workers

On your turn you spend workers to activate different spots. One of things you can do every turn is make cheese. You spend a worker and a cheese token. Then you can also gather resources with another one of your workers. These resources are either livestock, building materials, order cards, or berries. And finally, you can spend a worker to activate a building, if you have a building to activate. When you place down a worker to make cheese you also spend a cheese token that you have. When someone is out of cheese tokens that is the end of the game.

The spots you can place a worker does have another feature to it as well. When you place a worker, it might be pointing across the board, or to the left or the right. The board will rotate after each player has placed each turn. And players place all at once. When your wedge of cheese/worker is pointing at you, it comes back off the board.

The Game Board

The game board is interesting as well and important for how the game plays. The board is split into four sections, so each player is going to have one section that is pointed at themselves. Each section is going to give you points in a different way.

One is more area control where you get benefits for having the most cheese in some areas. The other gives you a choice, more points for putting your cheese on one side of the cheese display, or more resources that you get if you put them on the other side. The third one is about creating pairs of cheese. And the final one is creating a path of cheese around a section of the board.

Scoring Points

So each section of the boards is one of the ways that you will score points. When you score points in a few other ways. One is that you can build a building that will give you points. Then you also get points for completing order cards. Finally, you score points for making cheese that is fruited or that is with jam. The berries will score points for fruiting and jam by multiplying the number you fruited with the number you turned into jam. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

What Doesn’t Work

This is a weirdly simple game, but also slightly complex game. I think that getting down scoring for each section, at least on BGA, can be a bit tricky. You want to make cheese and sometimes the best option isn’t to make cheese. Plus you need to think not only about what scores you points but when you’ll be getting your workers back because you can do one action per worker and you really don’t want to get stuck with zero workers one rotation. So what you do is simple but with the scoring it can be a bit more than it feels like. It’s not a real negative, just that you’ll likely learn scoring after a game or two.

What Works

I like the speed and simplicity of your worker placement. You do have choices where you can place your worker, but not too many. And you need to think about getting your workers back, like I mentioned. So a lot of the time how many spots you actually want to move is going to be fairly limited. Add in that everyone goes at once means that the game turns are only as slow as the slowest player that turn.

I like the timing mechanism of placing workers. I could place all my workers out, or as many as I can, turn one and not get them back until turn four if I wanted. That is going to be a poor decision, most likely, but you could do that. Or I decide that I really want to gain, let’s say, three cows. That means because I’m waiting a while for that worker to come back, I’m playing less powerful options or more specific options the next couple of rounds. It’s a great balancing puzzle of when you get a lot of resources or a harder to make cheese versus when you just want your workers back for the next round.

One last element that I like, and I like more in the game, but to highlight, is how you start to become different throughout the game. You might unlock a different building or just have different buildings than your opponents. That means that you get a specific bonus or an extra worker placement spot to use. And that I think is a fun element for a game like this. It doesn’t make you completely different from the other players, but just gives you a different way to hone your strategy.

Who Is Fromage For?

I think Fromage is a pretty solid welcoming game. Like I said in the what doesn’t work, scoring for each section might take a new player a game to figure out. But what you do on your turn is simple enough. Place a worker once to make cheese. Place a worker once to gather resources, and place a worker once to use a building if you have one. It’s really just that simple so it’s a fun theme that I think a lot of people are going to love. But for more seasoned gamers, it’s still going to be fun because you get an interesting strategy as to how you place out your workers and when you get workers back.

My Final Thoughts on Fromage

There’s one element that makes this a very solid game. I like it, let’s start out with that. But I think the best element of the game is how you get your workers back. That timing puzzle of when you put down a worker who might take another turn to get there, versus getting it back next turn, it’s fun. And you generally don’t want to get a turn with no or one worker, but it might be worth it to score a lot of points some time.

And I feel like each way that you score, whether it’s berries, which can be really high scoring, or in a section, they all give you good ways to get points without feeling broken. So one game I might decide to push hard on that area control board and make sure I get as much cheese on there as I can. Or I might play it smart with the adjacency part of the board, or I could just go for fruited cheeses and jams to get the best multiplier score that I can. I decide what type of scoring I want. And the game is fast enough that if it doesn’t workout, you can always just decide to play again.

My Score: B+
Strategy: C+
Luck: D

There isn’t much luck in Fromage. Some luck in what orders you draw, but they are just one way to score that you don’t need to lean into at all, so it’s a low luck game. But it’s also not so heavy in strategy that you are planning out. But, as I said, it’s that nice balance of just enough strategy and easy and fast enough to play that I think it works well for me.

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The Game

This game has you racing to raise the temperature, oxygen levels, and flip over ocean tiles to score the most points. To do this you are playing down cards, in two different ways. The first is to select the action you are going to take. You can develop, construct, activate actions, produce income or draw cards. And they activate in that particular order. But only the ones which had cards played down activate. But on develop and construct, you are playing cards from your hand that do different things. Development cards will improve your production. The other cards can give you a one time benefit or help you build up an engine to get more cards, resources, or points.

As players you build out that engine to raise those two tracks and flip tiles. In the end, you want to play out the most points possible. But if you only focus on driving those three end game conditions, all which need to be completed, early in the game, you can end up without an engine built later. So it is a balancing act of getting points consistently versus a lot at the end.

What Doesn’t Work

Some of the pieces don’t work well in this game. Let’s run through all of them. The ocean tiles are dumb, it’s kind of a carry over from Terraforming Mars. Now, don’t get me wrong, the rewards on the tiles are nice, but the fact they are tiles is dumb. This is a card game, those tiles are just fiddly and annoying. To get to the middle ones you need to push the rest out of the way. Just give me a small deck of cards to put on the scoring board and let me flip one from the top each time to determine the rewards.

Then there are the cubes in this game. Cubes are used to track the oxygen, temperature, scores, production levels and supplies. This isn’t bad, but I have the Target version, so in the Kickstarter version on the player board for production and supplies they have a dual layer board. The Target version is flimsy cardboard. Now, that is me not spending on the Kickstarter, but I will need to upgrade my version later. And the score track and oxygen and temperature tracks, the cubes just don’t fit on them, and that I’d call bad design.

I also already want more cards in the game. I haven’t played it a ton of times, but we ran through all the cards in the first game and had to reshuffle. Now, not a major issue, but I wouldn’t mind a few more cards already. There are some cards dependent upon temperature or oxygen levels, so those aren’t played as often.

What Works

Engine Building

For me the engine building works really well. Being able to produce so much and really target different types of production to either play more cards, or make points somehow is a lot of fun. And it is a tactical engine building game. There is enough randomness in the cards that you get that you need to be able to pivot. Maybe you are getting a lot of planets to start but then draw cards that need heat, you’ll need to pivot. I like that style of engine building because I can’t go in with a single set strategy, like say Dominion.

Corporations

I also like the corporations. Any game where you start out different from everyone else, that’s fun. And I like the different types of corporations. I have played with one where I got a ton of credits but not that great a secondary power. I also have gone with one that gave me starting production in plants but way fewer credits and a solid power. So you can really decide between a wide variety of corporations when you start to tailor your game play.

Simultaneous Play

So, one thing I didn’t talk about was t hat each phase, the ones that are activated anyways, everyone does. So if I do development and you do research, we both get to do both of them. But when you play down a phase you get an extra benefit. So if I am the one who played down development, we can all play a development card, at the same time, but I get to play mine for three less cost wise. This simultaneous play really keeps the game moving. Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition isn’t the fastest game, but there is never downtime.

Is This Game Good?

I really like this game. I covered some issues but they are generally production issues. And the thing with cards, I don’t know all the cards, and I haven’t played all of them myself in my plays. I just can see myself picking a strategy and fishing for my favorite cards eventually. But the game itself is a ton of fun. I like engine building a lot, and this gives me that. I like games with little to no downtime, and I get that. And I like games that make me think about what my opponent is doing.

Going back to the picking of actions. I can decide to trigger another phase if I think you will trigger the one I want. If you need money and I need money, maybe I do research to get more cards because I’ll get money when you trigger production. So there isn’t player interaction of a negative variety, but if I’m smart I can leverage what you are doing or likely to do, to my advantage.

My Grade: A-
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: C

I think some gamers will want this game to be more like Terraforming Mars was. It’s not bad that it isn’t, but that’ll be the complaint. And for casual gamers, there is still a lot going on. It’s really fun though, and I’d recommend it for someone who is looking to take a step into some more complex games.

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