A Clever Twist on a Classic
🛕Rajas of the Ganges: Cards & Karma is a new card-only variant of Rajas of the Ganges. When the Roll&Write variant of the game was released 4 years ago I was very pleasantly surprised 🙂 - I have similar feelings now for this card variant too. These aren’t just uninspired remakes of the original euro, but creatively reimagined versions that feel familiar but use other game mechanics!
The core of Cards & Karma are the multiuse cards. ⬜ On one side they show things the players can collect - buildings 🕌, goods 🛍️, ships ⛵ or one-time special palace 🏰 actions. On the backside are die faces 🎲 showing a color and a number. Instead of getting physical dice, players will grab cards for their backsides and use those values. ☝️You only see the color of the dice on the front side of cards however, the values are always unknown. While higher numbers are generally better, luckily there are also uses for low numbers. 😉
As you play there is a grid of cards in the middle of the table. You can either take a card into your hand for free as a die value, or get a card for your tableau in front of you. Each card type can be acquired in different ways. For buildings you need to pay with specific color dice, ships need a ‘1’, ‘2’ or ’3’ of any color, and goods are free. The 5 different palace actions all cost a different die value.
The game itself is basically a race to flip over 6 scoring cards. To flip a card you either need to pay 6 coins or 3 fame tokens. How do you get those? Well, you collect sets of ‘things’. 😁 At any time if you have 3 different or 3 of the same building, goods or ships you have to discard them. This is interesting because building or ship cards could also show goods, or e.g. a card could show 2 buildings - so timing is important, as you might lose something useful not part of the set itself.
In exchange for Goods you get coins, while Buildings and Ships reward you with Administrator cards, which have useful effects and can be exchanged for Fame!
Cards & Karma plays quickly and it has a small footprint, yet it invokes similar feelings to playing the ‘old’ Rajas of the Ganges. A clever spin on the original game! ☺️
