In both versions of Goblins 3, I start with five jokers.
In Gobliins 2 Floppy, I only start with three.
But in Gobliins 2 CD, right away it tells me "You haven't got any joker here!"

Is that normal? I'd be surprised if they cut jokers from the CD version of the game.

Hmmm. Very odd. I wonder if the ScummVM devs could be persuaded to see this as an original bug, and therefore fixable?

Side question, less important, I recall that Goblins 3 (Floppy version) was tricky about savescumming jokers. If you used one and immediately loaded your saved game, the joker would not come back. But using ScummVM, it seems you can easily trick it into giving you all of the jokers back. In fact, it's almost impossible not to. Just start a new game, and you'll have five jokers. Then load your previously saved game, and you'll still have them, even if you had fewer when you saved it.

Is that how it always worked? I don't remember the jokers being so easy to trick.

Also, did Gobliins 2 for floppy have an anti savescum feature? ScummVM doesn't seem to have one - jokers are saved and loaded with your game.

I'm not sure, but I believe that the thing with the jokers has to do with how the savegames are stored in different versions of the games. The savegames are their own entries, but the joker count is global, and thus affects all of them.

ScummVM creates a separate file for each save slot, which allows for some exploitation (info currently here).

On the other hand, if my vague memories of playing the floppy version of Goblins 3 are anything to judge from, all the savegame data there was stored in the same file (CAT.INF), which also stored the joker count - so there wasn't much you could do to reset it without wiping out all your savegames in the process (apart from some hacking, maybe - there existed a fan-made patch which altered the save file to bring the jokers back).

Gobliins 2 floppy had CAT.INF and SAVE.INF files, but I have no idea which one stored what, so I can't tell whether using the jokers affected all save slots or just the most recently used one. Didn't really use jokers back then, as my limited English made them mostly useless anyway.