Jungle Jam

About this board game

Jungle Jam is a party game for 2–10 players with an approximately 20-minute playing time, centered on quick pattern recognition and a wooden totem.

Players place the totem between them and flip cards from their decks. Whenever two revealed cards show the same pattern, the players displaying that pattern race to grab the totem. The game’s central challenge is spotting the match and reacting before the other player.

• Players: 2–10
• Playing time: approximately 20 minutes
• Key component: a wooden totem
• Core mechanic: matching revealed card patterns

According to the available BoardGameGeek information, Jungle Jam is a non-authorized version of Jungle Speed/Arriba!. The publication history states that the German company Touchmore created and published it in 1998, and that it was released in Belgium, where Jungle Speed was not commercially distributed. It became popular there quickly.

BoardGameGeek lists Jungle Jam’s release year as 2000. In June 2007, the creators of Jungle Speed discovered the game being commercialized at a Joueclub location in Paris, where it was also prepared for inclusion in the retailer’s Christmas catalog. Legal proceedings began on September 20, 2007, and the final verdict on March 19, 2010, awarded the rights to Jungle Speed. Joueclub was required to pay compensation and organize a recall, recovering two-thirds of the 3,473 games sold after commercialization was forbidden.