Game Review – Jungle Speed

It’s no secret that I really enjoyed Dobble, It’s been a feature at a lot of gatherings with friends since we got our copy. While it’s been enjoyed by us all over the festive period and now into the colder winter months, I’ve been wanting another game that can create as many laughs and shrieks of entertainment.

Well I got to play another game that can provide similar levels of fun to Dobble, but can also be violent too.

Players: 2 – 10
Age: 7+
Game Length: 15 Minutes
Price: £14.99
Available from your nearest store

While Dobble is pretty simple to pick up, there are a few additional rules to get used to with Jungle Speed. But once you’ve picked the rules up the game is a very easy game to play.

There is a deck of 80 cards that gets distributed out as evenly as possible to all the players. The cards feature various different patterns which are different colours. The basics of the game is snap, but with faster reactions.

You place the totem pole that comes with the game in the middle of the players. You then proceed one by one to flip the top card of your deck over to reveal the pattern. If one player puts down a card with a star pattern on then another player puts a card down with the same pattern these players are now in a duel.

How do you win that duel? You grab the totem before the other player. That’s it. So you’ve got to be pretty swifty with your reactions to grab the totem before the other player. The winner of the duel gets to give his discard pile and the loser of the duels discard pile to the loser. The other players who weren’t involved in the duel put their discard pile under the totem to build up a pile of cards.

Should someone think they’ve drawn a card that matches another players and grabs the totem only to find out the cards did not match, They get punished. The player that mistakenly grabs the totem must then take any of the cards in the discard pile under the totem and the other players discard piles too. It can be a very costly mistake.

Just when you think things are easy enough to pick up there are 3 trick cards in Jungle Speed.

One with arrows pointing in means it’s a race between all players to grab the totem in the middle. The winner of this duel featuring all players puts their discard pile under the totem. They also get to start the round off.

One with arrows pointing outwards means all players play a card simultaneously on the count of 3, with any other trick cards having their effect. In the event this causes a duel between three or more players, the winner of the round may choose who the loser will be, or what duel type he/she played for. Any additional duels left over are void for the next round.

And finally a card with different coloured arrows means that the duration of this round till it comes back to the player that drew the colour card, shapes are not relevant anymore but colours. So should you draw any shape that’s blue and another player draws another card that’s blue this starts your duel.

Once you’ve managed to discard all of your deck you win. Just be sure to not mistakenly grab the totem as you’re back to square one again.

While there is a bit more too this game than Dobble, It still produced a lot of laughs. As you can imagine the duels to grab the totem creating most of the laughs and injuries. Playing with ladies that take care of their nails can be dangerous as you can potentially come away with nail marks on your hand which we did encounter on one of our duels. The satisfaction of seeing someone grab the totem incorrectly thus putting them on the back foot when you were fractions away from making a dive for the totem yourself is very amusing.

We found the game lasted alot longer than 15 minutes on one play through, and while it was entertaining we were getting to the point we were wanting someone to win sooner rather than later. That could have been due to alcohol and tiredness kicking in though. Again bringing Dobble for comparisons, we found that a few games of Jungle Speed was enough whereas when playing Dobble there was never a point where we thought about stopping. It’s probably that on our play through of Jungle Speed the games were lasting abnormally longer than we’d have expected.

All in all thought it’s another great party game that can be incorporated with drinking if you’re at that kind of party or enjoyed with family and friends of all ages. Just be gentle when diving for that totem if playing with little ones, and don’t fall out with friends when your insistent that you grabbed the totem first.

– Murr