First Impressions of Mombasa!

I struggle with stocks and shares in games. Somehow I just can’t get my head around how to manage gaining influence in a company, while making sure that company grows too. It always feels like it is easy to nobble an opponent (I’m having flashbacks to my first impressions of 1830 article here…). I just can’t think the systems through!

Mombasa is a game with stocks and shares (yikes!) It’s also one of the highest rated games released last year, so I with a mix of excitement and trepidation sat down to play a couple of weeks ago. Four companies rise and fall in value like ancient empires, except here they’re colonial trading companies spreading across Africa like a venereal plague. No, no, they aren’t invading! Those chaps in the pith helmets are explorers, surveyors, not soldiers. Those guns are purely defensive!

It’s perhaps best not to think too hard about what your activities in Mombasa represent as your coffee, cotton, banana and pith helmet industries’ casual exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa is elegantly obfuscated behind Euro-game mechanisms. Here, Africa is merely a backdrop for an economic slugfest. Mombasa could easily feature any economic theme, and their casual selection of this somewhat contentious theme deserves comment if not necessarily judgement. It need not spoil your experience of a terrific game, but the associated history casts a long shadow the game cannot quite shake off.

But what a fantastic set of mechanisms it has! My God, the brilliant hand management system is a sub game I could play all day long! Each round you play 3 (or later more) cards out below your board, use their abilities and then move them to corresponding discard piles above the board. At the end of the round, you pick up all the cards from one of these piles into your hand. Combining this with the card market means you are constantly planning your future turns as you play. It’s a magnificent system that I absolutely love!

Even the stocks and shares system is elegant and easy to visualise. The value of a company is directly tied to the number of little Monopoly houses that company has out on the board, but so long as you get a certain number out, even if wiped away later a company will maintain some value. How far you are able to advance on the tracks associated with each company, combined with some extra share cards you can buy from the market, determines the points you’ll have from that company at the end of the game.

Indeed, everything in this game would be fairly easy to understand if it wasn’t for books, which just like in real life are laughably complicated. How you are still reading this is beyond me! Building the book track is like an enterprise in madness, but works much like any book collection. You build up a large line of them, then skip through them all in one go. Or carefully read all of them getting you the full reward, but taking ages! I’d explain this in more detail but, frankly, I think we’d be here all day if I tried. One thing we can all agree on is that gems are much easier than books.

Mombasa is an exciting collection of elements and mechanics that are mostly easy to grasp (except books), but when put together create this living, breathing ecosystem, all things interacting and affecting the others. It presents you with an incredible array of options, that the challenge is not in any one mechanic (except books) but in planning a route through all of them at once. There is honestly something for every experienced gamer, whether it’s the awesome hand management, the challenge of the book track, or the fighting over stocks and the map. The genius though is that whatever you explore first, it leaves you excited to try something else next time!