Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa, a mid-weight euro game published by Osprey Games. Despite its daunting look, Sankoré plays really smoothly.

These days board game consumers are seeing more designers branch out to highlight historical and cultural importance rather than retell the same tales of land and cash grabs by merchants and aristocrats. These new themes still fit comforably within the Euro design space, lending a familiarity of mechanisms while these newer themese are learned and enjoyed. It’s not often that a game brings an entirely new facet to the industry. We’re all in a cycle of shared knowledge and incremental advancement.

With Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa, designers Fabio Lopiano and Mandela Fernández-Grandon tackle the return of Mansa Musa to the city of Timbuktu and the resulting determination to develop a prestigious university. And while this sounds like a co-op premise, players find themselves engaged in a scholarly competition to bring the most prestige to this academic setting.

The easiest way to parse the somewhat daunting game board is to break it down into its areas of study: astronomy, theology, mathematics, and law. These four disciplines drive a system of interconnectivity and an ever-increasing shared knowledge value that benefits everyone at the table. Before we get too deep, it must be noted that Sankoré plays from one to four players with an approximate playtime of two to three hours.

Each discipline interacts with each other. Salt gained from astronomy can be used to pay for studies in theology, which provides books that power mathematics, which provides gold for astronomy. And law provides bonus tokens that boost the power of each of these. Each discipline also has a randomly populated queue of students from each discipline waiting to be enrolled in your classes.

Players begin with basic classes in each of the four disciplines. They then select a combination of class/student/book from an initial draft to provide