How to Play Mombasa Board Game & Review

Mombasa is an action programming, hand management game.

Title: Mombasa

Year Published: 2015

Designer: Alexander Pfister

Publisher: Pegasus Spiele

Players: 2-4

Game Time: ~150 minutes

Set-up Time: ~5 minutes

Ages: 12+

Theme: 1800’s Africa

Mechanisms: Action Movement Programming, Area Influence, Hand Management, Stock Holding

How to win: Make the most money

Game Description

In Mombasa, players acquire shares of chartered companies based in Mombasa, Cape Town, Saint-Louis, and Cairo and propagate trading posts of these companies throughout the African continent in order to earn the most money.

How to play Mombasa

Mombasa Round-Up

So… One thing I missed in the ‘How to play’ video is that when you play a Bookkeeper (and via some other methods) you get ‘Book Points’ that lets you to add a book token from the mainboard to your personal board…

Card Mechanism

The main mechanism of these active decks and resting decks where you’re planning for several moves ahead is fantastic. Not only do you have to play cards you need this turn, but you need to think about the resting deck pile and how the card you play this turn will affect it.

It means you have can have one very good, specialised turn. Maybe you play your 3 best ‘Exploration’ cards in one turn. Those cards are then split into 3 different decks so it’ll take at least 3 rounds just to get them back in your hand. The game is only 7 rounds long so don’t mess about!

You also have to plan to try and get a majority bonus as well as play cards that you can spend to get more cards… It’s a delicate system, don’t mess up 🙂

We’ve not even covered the shares yet.

Shares

You get shares from certain cards and moving around the company tracks. But the number of shares you have is only dependant on the value of these shares, this is where the area influence part comes in.

As players gain shares, and therefore interest in a company, the fight to expand it and reduce the value of other companies begins. Later in the game, the 4 companies expand out and a 4-way tug of war with players increasing the value of some while reducing the value of others.

It’s tricky, but everything just works very well together.

Mombasa Rating

An excellent Euro with a great mix of mechanisms that still leaves the game clear and easy to understand. Great Western Trail challenged and failed to overtake this 🙂

I give it 7/10

Mombasa First Impressions April 2017

Positives

The card play is great. You have to think 2-3 turns ahead as a card you play now, you might not get back for 4-5 rounds. It also means if you play all your cards of one Good, that set of cards is split up over 3 piles and it’ll take 3 rounds at least to get them all back. You really have to think…

Everything works together really well. You want to do it all every turn but with only 3-5 cards each round you can’t so you have to do what’s best for you this round. (While thinking about the next round)

There is a lot of fighting over spaces with the action disks and having the most of a Good… But it’s not frustrating or annoying like some games where you’re battling like this. You can play all of a good if someone has more than you then you can buy cards instead.

Actions are pretty quick, you generally know what you need to do on your next action so the game moves on pretty quickly.

Negatives

If you program cards wrong or misuse your action disks you can waste an entire round!

It looks boring, the only reason I played it is because I like the designer 🙂

Mombasa Summary

Alexander Pfister is the man and this game is great 🙂

Jesta ThaRogue