Bombay sees the players take on the role of Merchants in the land of India. In this pick-up and deliver game the players seek to acquire goods at trading posts and deliver them to the cities where they are in demand. Of course they must do so on Elephant back and along the way they can build Palaces, which can earn them riches should the opposition be forced to travel through them.
Driving the play, each player must make use of a limited number of Action Points each turn. Visiting each city earns a City Token and having 3 or 4 of these earns rupees. Rupees are also earned for building palaces and collecting client tokens over the course of the game. The players with the best 3 totals also earn rupees and the most rupees gained at the end of the game determines the winner.
During the game the players will acquire goods which they will try to resell at the best price in four cities. Each type of good has its own market where the prices of the goods will fluctuate. To transport their goods, each player owns a charming elephant able to transport up to two bundles.
Up to now Bombay will be one of Ystari's lightest games.
It's the third game of author Cyril Demaegd. Illustrations are by Stéphane Poinsot.
- Great table presence
- Accessible introduction to pickup-and-deliver mechanics
- Good for younger or less experienced players
- Margins are small and incremental
- Not very exciting for experienced gamers
- Limited replay value
- pickup and deliver logistics driven by supply and demand
- India, port-trade themed map with elephants and temples
- light thematic flavor with straightforward logistics
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Action Point System — Limited actions per turn; extra action cost on hills.
- pickup and deliver — Move pieces to collect and deliver goods to temples; outposts generate passive income.
- Resource demand escalation — Value of goods increases as demand for certain types rises.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- this is Bombay by estari games
- this is a more traditional pickup and deliver Style game
- it's a nice way to maybe introduce pickup deliver and logistics for younger children or you know less experienced gamers
- you’re going to outgrow this one pretty quickly
- not really cut the mustard for experienced Gamers
- it does what it does well and it's a good example of a very simple pickup and deliver game
- this is more of your traditional Euro as you are essentially trying to manage your Fleet of ships
- I thought this was kind of surplus to requirements
- the game also has this investment system where you can actually invest in other players
- I didn't really think that the again incremental way of scoring was that significant
- this game suffers a lot of the same fate as Francis Drake
- this is one of the nicest looking board games I've ever played
- very attractive I think it's Michael Manziel artwork really does look fantastic
- this is a card driven Euro as you have a hand of these character cards
- the pacing of the game is really good
- it's a very polished Euro I think
- not being able to carry certain resources from round to round unless you pretty much spend your whole time to use a resource
- I couldn't really recommend