Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa

I am not known for my patience with repeated plays, and yet I could play Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa every day. There is only one small, entirely reasonable condition: I never have to explain it to a new player again, and there is a butler at the executive retreat to set it up and pack it away. Modest requirements, really.

At its core, it is a very solid Lopiano mini-game mix, where the individual parts do not feel merely piled on top of one another. They fit together beautifully and feed the game’s development, while the engine building gradually becomes meaningful rather than being a disconnected promise of progress.

Your interaction with the game mainly comes through how you build and exploit that engine, while the decisions carry enough weight to provide the pleasantly painful brain-burn I want from a good euro. In our group, it also did not produce any major tendencies toward AP paralysis — though I will not lead you astray, because those are dangerous things to promise.

The problem, if it truly is a problem, is the teach. It is fairly complex to explain, especially if you make the mistake of starting to suggest possible strategies, and setup alone feels like an activity for the solitary player’s cave. Still, if someone asked me what I would change, I honestly could not think of anything. A perfect game; twice as perfect if the group has already set it up before you arrive to teach worker placement.