Jump Drive
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 10-30 minutes
Designer: Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Putting it simply, Jump Drive is scintillating to play. Every card you play rockets you forward towards the end of the game as you create a powerful engine in only a few turns.
Pros
- Some of the best engine-building in the business
- Plays fast but each decision requires a lot of thought and sacrifices to make
- Cards paying for other cards will have you scratching your head
- Easy to play multiple games in a row!
Cons
- Initially difficult to get your head around all of the symbols
- No player interaction makes the game feel a bit random
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Jump Drive is what you get when you give Race for the Galaxy too much sugar and red cordial. It makes an already fast engine-building game even more hyper. Meanwhile, it dials back the iconography making it simpler to pick up and easier to play.
You begin the game with the goal of collecting 50 credits and a hand of five cards.
From there, you’ll face a choice each turn:
- Play a development card at a one-cost discount.
- Play a planet card and then draw a new card.
- Or play both a development and a planet card, but receive none of the additional benefits.
Once you’ve played your card/s, you then get to activate all cards played previously. So that you generate more and more resources over multiple rounds.
As you can imagine, Jump Drive is all about the cards. While they generate resources, they’re resources themselves and are used to pay for the cards you play. So, a three-cost card requires you to discard three cards.
This is one of the toughest decisions in board gaming. What cards will you give up to play the cards you think are the best? Almost every card in Jump Drive is excellent and powerful in its own right. This decision becomes impossible, yet still, you must make it.
Thankfully, there is some leniency with hostile planets. These can be played using your military might, rather than cards from your hand.
Lastly, instead of playing a card, players can spend their turns exploring, letting them draw a number of cards from the deck and keeping two. Though given how tight Jump Drive is, this should come with big red a warning: only use in case of emergencies!
Starting at the epilogue
Jump Drive is an engine builder moving at lightspeed. Games don’t last long, and your credit generation ramps up exponentially with each turn.
Unlike other games in the genre like Everdell, which has a distinct start, mid-game, and end game. Jump Drive begins in the epilogue, where your engine is already built and exploding. Your job is to throw more fuel into the fire to make sure it doesn’t burn out!
To keep this fire burning, there are a huge number of card combinations. Along with the random card draws, no two games play the same. This makes for awesome replayability, but not so awesome for long-term planning.
Instead, your strategy emerges throughout the game as you draw and play cards.
While that sounds like you’re at the whim of Lady Luck, and to some extent you are, it still requires a Top Gun level pilot to control the cards you’re given. There are so many different paths to victory, and the cards are all so powerful, that you will be guessing, and second-guessing, whether the cards you played were the best you had.
Add to these strategies, the need to sacrifice cards to play other cards. You’ll be biting your nails, and pulling your hair out throughout Jump Drive’s short playtime.
Better than Splendor?
This is the type of card game where you can sit down, bang out a quick game, set it up and play it again, ad nauseam. There’s so much depth in the game, that you’ll want to explore every nook and cranny of the deck. Experimenting with what works well, and not so much.
As such Jump Drive is a game more about you interacting with the deck and the cards. Then it is your opponent. While you can look across the table and see how their engine is performing, that’s the limit of the interaction you’ll have.
This will be a turn-off for some, but a turn-off for everyone is the awful rulebook. Like Power Grid, reading it left me with more questions than answers. Unforgivable at the best of times, but when there are so many different combinations and symbols, it becomes a point of frustration.
Otherwise, while everyone talks about Century: Spice Road being the Splendor killer, I’m on the sidelines thinking that if any game were to murder Splendor it would Jump Drive.
Both are 20-30 minute no-nonsense engine builders, but Jump Drive has this element of playfulness with its abilities not found in Splendor. The agonising and constant decision-making around which cards to play, and which to give away found in Jump Drive makes it a truly special game.
So maybe it’s a draw.
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RftG is doable with the iconography, have someone teach it or practice with the app. Century spice, don’t make me laugh. I won every version hands down. I never won at Splendor. That’s a compliment to splendor.
David, thanks for the review. I was introduced to Race for the Galaxy a while back, and the iconography was just too much for me to get started. I realize that if I were to stick with it for a few games, I could get into it. I have played Roll for the Galaxy which seems simpler. It sounds like Jump Drive could work as well because it plays so fast, you could probably learn the symbols more quickly and move into enjoyment much faster.
You asked about engine building — if you are into Euro games, I would really recommend you take a look at London (2nd edition). It is a Martin Wallace game, really wonderful. There is more player interaction than you describe here because to build a card, you have to discard one to a tableau that other players can access, so you are watching what they play and vice versa. Once you know how to play, it probably runs 60-120 minutes depending on AP. However, it also has this tense balance and interaction where not only are you watching what they are building, you are also struggling to maintain less poverty than they have as you rebuild London. That tension is, to me, delicious. It has engine building at its core — you literally build your city which functions like an engine and then you run it and it does what you have built it to do. However, every time you do this, your poverty increases, so you have to keep an eye on that. I think you might want to look it over.
Hey Anton,
I think Jump Drive is OK in terms of iconography. There aren’t that many icons, but used a lot. Though the game is worth the small investment, in my opinion.
Anyway, after you’re last recommendation went down a treat. I’m all too happy to take you up on this one. I’ve actually heard great things about London, and the way you describe it, it sounds right up my alley! As a bonus I know where I can get it for cheap!
Cheers!