Sankoré preview
Sankoré: Pride of Mansa Musa was one of the “must-play” demos of SPIEL23 for me. I love ‘Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road’ which is also from Fabio Lopiano and Osprey Games, and also illustrated by Ian O´Toole, so this game instantly spoke to me. We played around 90 minutes which was enough to get a general feel for the game.
TL;DR
Sankoré has a pretty unconventional way of taking actions, as you teach classes to students, and thus trigger the appropriate actions depending on the 4 types of class. These 4 types then correspond to 4 different sections of the game board where you can place down your pieces.
There is a lot of resource management and a primary focus is area majority: there will be multiple majority scorings triggered in different times for each of the 4 board sections.
Also unique: How much VP each type of “Inspiration” token is worth at the end of the game is controlled by players via a shared library, where spent books go during the game.
How to play
If you’ve read the rulebook you won’t read much new here, but I’ll try to distill the general flow of the game.
Each turn you pick 2 different actions out of 5, then it’s the next players turn. The game flows without any end of round steps or such, until the game’s end is triggered, where you tally up points to see who has won. There will be a few majority scorings during game though as you’ll see later. I think it’s best to just list out the actions to help you understand better.
Actions
Enroll a student:
You pick a meeple from one of 4 rows on the gameboard. These are basically “ammo” for you to do actions later. An interesting thing is that each removed meeple uncovers a bonus that applies to everyone, making future actions stronger there.
Teach a class:
This is how you do actions on the game board. You need to have a meeple you can move onto your class tile, and depending on what class it is you will interact with a different part of the board.
Astronomy moves your camel and you can place down tents on the map.
Mathematics allows you to place walls on a grid and take bonuses from the row or column.
Theology allows you to place mosques in the theology area
Law allows you to place crowns in the law area
Where you can place pieces depends on the strength of the action. There is always a shared strength value as I mentioned earlier, plus already placed pieces will increase the strength of actions for you only. If the meeple's color matches the class you get a bonus effect. Additionally, during the game you can gather tiles that are more bonus effects triggered when using a specific class.
There is also a kind of resource loop: Theology needs Salt but gives you Books; Mathematics needs Books but provides Gold; Astronomy needs Gold but gives Salt. For Law you need all kinds of things.
Establish a class:
You pick a new class tile to extend your pyramid shaped tableau. This is where you send meeples to trigger actions when teaching. In the beginning you only have 4 basic classes in the bottom row.
Graduate a student:
This basically means you discard a student from your player board to claim an achievement depending on what level of your pyramid the student was in. This is a race for bonus points.
Exchange favor:
Multiple effects move your token up the favor track.
With this action you can either claim a bonus from the track and take a favor tile that blocks space for Inspiration tokens;
Or discard a favor tile, to have more place for Inspiration tokens.
So to summarize, you will mainly take student meeples from the board and teach classes to take actions. Those are the 2 primary actions you do on most of your turns.
Some more important details
As students are drafted from their rows on the game board, you will uncover scoring icons. There are 2 of these in each of the 4 rows, so you’ll have 8 interim scorings in each game. With certain effects some tokens will be placed in the Mathematics grid, and the game’s end is triggered when the grid is full. If some areas didn’t have both scorings already, then you will do them before summing up VPs.
As it is hard to do everything, we all focused on 2-3 main areas, which meant we didn’t get anything during certain scorings. It was also a bit strange how someone doing a more powerful action later (because with less meeples in the row the actions get stronger) could easily take majority from you, which lead to some feel-bad moments. I think that’s a thing you will have to get used to.
One more thing about the shared library I mentioned before: whenever a player spends a book, they get to decide in which of the 3 rows of the library board they put it in. At the end of the game you check which color of book has 1st/2nd place majority in their row, and the value of same-colored inspiration tokens will be appropriately increased (Inspiration are special VP tokens that are awarded upon certain effects).
Closing thoughts
I really liked how you have to structure your classes and send meeples upwards on your little class-tableau to do actions. It’s very unique and requires a different way of thinking than most euros. The resource management is also cool, and there are some free actions to get more resources or using the favor track to get some missing stuff. You also get some goal cards that help steer you in a certain direction.
I wasn’t a fan of the majority scoring so far, but it was only about half a game we played, so I definitely want to explore the game more when it releases. I am also curious if it will work well with 2p.
If you know Merv or Ian O’Toole, you know you are in for a visual treat too, but even with such high expectations this game looks absolutely amazing. One of the best I have ever seen for sure.
Thanks for reading!