105 STAR OF AFRICA
The first Star of Africa board game was printed in autumn 1951. A young Finn called
Kari Mannerla had read
about the world’s biggest diamond, the Star of Africa and got hold of an English map of the continent. From it he
randomly chose places that sounded exciting, and arbitrarily drew roads as well as shipping and flight routes, but
it then occurred to him that players should be able to choose their own individual
routes rather than follow a
preset one. His most important idea however was the creation of tokens, which would be shuffled around and
turned face down so that nobody would know what they would find in each place. More elements were added in
the form of bandits and horseshoes.
Since his 14th birthday Kari Mannerla had designed dozens of other games with fanciful names such as
Catch the Gangsters,
Radium War on Mars, Horror of the Seas, Treasure of the Incas, etc,
which he sold for
small payment to the Koulutarpeiden keskusliike company. The old commercial counsellor used to see him
coming and say, “Oh look, there comes the game boy again.”
Star of Africa was the last game that Mannerla invented. He created it when he was 19 and sensed that it
was pretty good. He offered it to the large publication house Tilgmann and, after a couple of years haggling over
the price, finally settled for a rather humble cheque for a run of 10,000 games. He was however wise enough to
set a condition that payment for any future runs would be negotiated separately, something that Tilgmann were
happy to agree to since there were hardly ever any new editions of board games. But this time it was different.
Another 10,000 were made
the following year already, and one edition led to another. Over 100,000 Star of
Africa games were sold in seven years.
After Tilgmann stopped marketing games in 1971 Star of Africa was made by Paletti and then since 1992 by
its successor Peliko. Esko Eronen, the founder of Peliko, had already been responsible for Star of Africa while
he was the director of Paletti, and has thus been associated with the game for more than 30 years now.
The millionth Star of Africa was sold in 1968, to a schoolgirl from Kuusamo, who was duly rewarded. More
than 4 million Star of Africa games have now been sold in Finland,. It is nearly as popular in Sweden, Norway
and Denmark as it is in Finland, and has been played in e.g. Austria for more than twenty years. New markets
are currently opening up in Russia, Estonia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Star of Africa never broke into the really big markets, probably because Mannerla did not start to promote it
until the 1980s, which was too late. The world’s leading game manufacturer in the United States was of the
opinion that, as 1950s Africa
was not currently fashionable, the game should be modified to take place in the
Middle East, for example. To this Mannerla replied that in that case Tarzan should be moved to the Middle East
as well. According to a German editor, Star of Africa was in no way different from
other ordinary travel board
games! A big British publisher was enthusiastic but misunderstood the game and ruined it, which was
unfortunate because the market for an English version would have covered half the world.
Fantastic German,
French and Italian versions were produced in Switzerland, but went off the market for some reason after only a
couple of years.
When he retired Mannerla got into creating a card game version of the game, and more than 50,000 of these
have been sold since 1996. In 1998 he signed a three-year deal with the Finnish Lottery Veikkaus for Star of
Africa scratch cards, of which more than 10 million have been sold. In 2006 Mannerla created “Treasure of the
Incas”, a modified version of Star of Africa set in South America, which,
like the original, was an overnight
success. A computer game version was also created by the Finnish Amer Corporation, but it was launched at a
bad time and did not succeed.
Mannerla spent his working life in the advertising business. He started as a 17-year-old trainee at the Ad
Agency Sek and retired after 55 years from his post as president of the board.
Kari Mannerla
– Inventor of the Star of Africa
