Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Regular readers of my content know that one of my main measures of a game is the fun factor regardless of whether I win or lose…but, especially if I lose. My eight-year-old son takes that to another level.
Jungo (2025, Happy Camper) is, in the immortal words of my son, the “GOAT of card games in 2025.” That’s because he won’t stop trying to play it.
He likes the monkeys on the cards. He likes the rules. He likes the play time. He likes winning Jungo. He likes losing Jungo, and he lost his first four plays before he finally won. He likes saying the word Jungo.
He likes playing Jungo after playing games he has already asked to play. “Daddy, can we do Pay Day, then a quick game of Jungo?” he recently asked, before even finishing the set up for Pay Day. (It was like he wanted to have Jungo for dessert.)
The two of us had a boys night recently, and after dinner (but before watching a movie), he had a request. “Can we play one hand of Jungo before we watch the movie?” he asked, holding Jungo in his hands. “It’s pretty quick, you know.”
He likes playing Jungo with the family, but I have a feeling he will bring Jungo to school for “show and tell” in the fall, in the hopes that he can get some of his buddies at school to play. He wanted to join my review play of Jungo with my review crew, despite that play happening after his bedtime. “I can do my bath, then come down to play Jungo if you want,” he asked, willingly.
He wants to take Jungo to the family beach trip so that he can show off the game to the grandparents. Eight plays in, my son has deemed Jungo worthy of a permanent slot on the family game shelf, hallowed ground in a house chock full of review copies.
What is This “Jungo” You Speak Of?
Jungo is a 2-5 player shedding game, based on the 2021 game Hachi Train. Both games were designed by Toshiki Arao. In Jungo, players are dealt a hand of 8-10 cards, with each card showing a value between one and eight. To win, a player must shed all cards from their hand before other players.
There is slightly more to it than that—namely, that a player’s hand cannot be altered during the initial deal, and when players put a single card or a run of the same card value on the table, an opponent who beats previously-played cards can choose to add those beaten cards to their hand to increase their options for future turns. But that’s really it…otherwise, this really is a race to get rid of all your cards.
Like other “ladder climbing” or shedding games, namely classics such as Tichu and SCOUT, or more recent additions such as last year’s Seers Catalog, Jungo is quick, a game that might last 10 minutes. Jungo offers a thrill ride where players think someone is about to go out, only to watch them not go out, while their neighbor has been quietly piling up matching cards to go out in a river of magic minutes later.
For me, Jungo is 2025’s version of Tower Up. It’s perfect because it is clean, fast, easy to teach, and always offers a few moments of “wow”, but I’m not sure it is the best game of its type ever made. (In my circles, SCOUT holds the ladder climbing GOAT distinction.) The variability in the artifact cards from Seers Catalog was more interesting than anything in Jungo, despite Jungo being the better game.
Jungo is just a very, very solid card game. Like my son, I think Jungo fits almost any environment, and I could absolutely see Jungo being the game people bring with them to play while sitting in line before a major event. You could teach it to non-gamers. You could probably get away with playing Jungo in your office cafeteria with four complete office strangers.
The one thing that has surprised me with Jungo is that it works well at all player counts. Even at two players, I have enjoyed my games of Jungo. It’s better at higher player counts, but it still works with less. You could slide this into almost any gaming environment and have it work there, too…short filler, long filler, part of a night with 20 other card games.
Here’s the worst thing I can say about Jungo: its box is almost comically too large. (Happy Camper’s previous release, Trio, had this same problem.) I am probably going to toss the box for Jungo so that I can fit it into a normal poker-size card box for travel purposes. The rules are also a little long for a game that has almost no rules to begin with, although I appreciated this for the sake of players who are new to ladder climbing games. (Weird fact: BGG lists just north of 300 games that feature this mechanic, but more than half of those games were released just in the last two years. To fans wondering if trick-taking and ladder-climbing games are spiraling out of control: you are right.)
Jungo is great. Buy a copy. Check that—buy two copies: one for yourself, and one for that card-curious friend who wants a few games to help them dive deeper into this part of the hobby. That way, you’ll have something to play—and love—when you visit them for a game night soon!
Jungo details
- Designer: 荒尾 俊樹 (Toshiki Arao)
- Artists: Laura Michaud
- Publishers: Broadway Toys LTD, Cocktail Games, Devir, Ghenos Games, Happy Baobab, Happy Camper, Hobby World, PaperGames (III), Rebel Sp. z o.o., Reflexshop, REXhry
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 15 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Hand Management, Ladder Climbing
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.95532 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Jungo.
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