Commodity cards are the heart of the game. Players get them at the beginning of every round, and trade them to get sets either of identical cards, sold for money, or of different cards, spent to acquire new development cards. Among the many different development cards are warehouses, to keep more commodity cards from one round to another, ships, to get more commodities every round, shipyards, merchants and, most of all, many different character cards, each one with a different ability. The result is complex and intricate card game, where one must both be lucky in the initial commodity deal every round, and then make the best use of one’s many cards and abilities.

Mundus Novus is a great game, cleverly developed and balanced, highly challenging to play. However, I can’t help being a bit disappointed. The graphics are highly professional, and the theme works well, but both are terribly unoriginal – unlike those of Days of Wonder’s Cargo Noir.
More important, when Serge first told me he was working on a card game using the market and commodity system from Mare Nostrum, I imagined something much simpler, lighter and faster – commodity cards and nothing more, something that would be to Mare Nostrum what Pit is to Civilization. May be it was impossible, may be it needed some additional effects to make it varied and challenging, but I can’t help thinking that Serge and Bruno added too much. There are so many different development cards, so many character effects, that from the mid-game on it becomes difficult enough to reckon one’s own cards and players start really considering what happens with their opponents’ ones.

A few months ago, I’ve published here an editorial about Ockham’s razor, in which I advised young would-be game authors to keep their games simple, and not to add unnecessary rules, mechanisms or components. After playing Philippe Keyaerts’ Olympos and Serge Laget and Bruno Cathala’s Mundus Novus, I’d like to extend my advise also to old seasoned game designers. Both Olympos and Mundus Novus are cleverly designed games, well developed, well tested, well balanced, but both would certainly be better if the few elements which add more complexity than interest were removed. The events in MUndus Novus add nothing to the game, and are easily forgotten, and the game would have benefited from their removal. The characters could be more interesting if each player had one for the whole game, rather than buying several all game long. Anyway, Mundus Novus is still a really good game, but may be a bit more complex than it should have been.