I admit that I enjoyed my time as the jewel thief the most because you’re trying to thwart points, and it’s also entertaining to watch your opponent squirm. It certainly takes me a bit longer than 3 seconds to make decisions so trying to identify patterns in real time is tough but worth the challenge. My experience with the main variant gave me some slight panic as the treasure hunter when the jewel thief is removing rows or columns. Finding pairs of jewels in a sea of options as fast as possible drives the excitement for the treasure hunter. This continues until someone reaches 5 points to win the game. Empty spaces in the grid are then filled, with matches also being removed but without gaining points. The matched cards are removed from the grid and shuffled into the deck along with other discarded cards. If this results in a group of 3 cards matching orthogonally, the player receives 1 point. That card can be added to their hand or discarded, drawing back up to a 2-card hand. In turn order, each player chooses a card from their hand to slide into the grid and push a card out of the grid. Each player draws 2 cards for their hand. In the match-3 variant, 16 cards are placed face-up into a 4 by 4 grid, with the remaining cards forming a deck. The player with the most points after 3 rounds wins. The roles will then swap so the jewel thief can have a chance at being the treasure hunter, finishing the round. At the end of the turn, the treasure hunter receives 1 point for each match they took. The catch is that during this time the jewel thief removes a row or column every 3 seconds, limiting the options for the treasure hunter. Once the jewel thief says “Go” the treasure hunter opens their eyes and takes two cards that match, repeating this until their turn ends. In the main variant, the jewel thief shuffles the deck and places every card face-up into a 6 by 6 grid while the treasure hunter closes their eyes. These thirty-six square cards will disappear quickly in the main variant of thievery. This review focuses on the main variant and a match-3 variant. Jewel Thief comes with a deck of 36 cards that can be played in four rule variants. The best experience is with 3 players to keep the gameplay short but engaging. Jewel Thief is a versatile card game for 2-4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play. When this game appeared in our review options I knew I had to try it out! I’ve always enjoyed matching games, especially ones that bring up fond memories of video games like Bejeweled from the early 2000s.

Jewels match 3 games