LogFAQs > #942203279

decided to wrap this today after all!

1. Hansa Teutonica (2009)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Action allocation, area control, route-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-90 minutes
Experience: 15-18 plays over 10-15 sessions with 3-5 players (2019-2020), incl 1 play each of Britannia Expansion, East Expansion
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/100 (2018)

Summary - Each player competes in the Hanseatic League of Traders in late-medieval Germany, attempting to score victory points by building networks. All of your actions in Hansa Teutonica are based on claiming routes: filling the empty spots between cities on a route with your personal traders and merchants, and then taking an action to clear that route out. Players can compete for control of cities, upgrade their action abilities, bump each other off of routes, and teleport their pieces around the board. Points are awarded for controlling cities, gaining bonus tiles, and connected offices.

Design - Hansa Teutonica is competition - distilled, concentrated, injected-in-your-veins competition.

This may be surprising, because you can view Hansa Teutonica as a sort of point salad. There are multiple ways to gain points during the course of play (controlling cities that people complete routes on; placing your presence on a spot with a printed VP; completing routes) and five different ways to gain points in endgame (full upgraded skills; control of cities; bonus markers; network; Coellen table. Point salads offer many routes to victory, which can sometimes reduce the sense of direct competition. But the thing that makes the varied ways of getting poins so clever in Hansa Teutonica is that they all come down to one singular mechanic: claiming routes.

To understand why it's contentious to claim routes, let's look at the initial board state: claiming a route the "traditional" requires three or four actions minimum: the two or three actions required to place your traders/merchants along a route, and then the final action to claim the route (thus removing those pieces from the houses on the route). So far, so good. But when the game starts, a player only gets two actions per turn. Drop two dudes (represented by wooden cubes and discs) on a route, and you're basically asking for someone else to drop in and block you.

There are myriad consequence and features that arise from this moment. Let's talk first about the displacement action. For an action - same as placing a piece normally - you actually have the ability to kick someone off of an occupied house (and onto an adjacent route), but you must "pay" a worker - i.e. send one from your available "supply" to your unused "stock." That stock will continue to grow as you displace others and claim routes, while your supply will dwindle - in order to replenish your useful supply, you need to take a bag action, which moves three pieces from your stock back to your supply.

Okay, so obviously you can block people. But other than cause a minor inconvenience for them, why would you do that? Here's where the brilliance of Hansa Teutonica begins to shine through: when you're kicked off the route, you get to move your piece to an adjacent route... and you also get to place on an adjacent route one of your pieces from your stock. By getting kicked, you get to bypass both bringing that extra piece into your supply via the bag action and having to spend an action placing it onto the board.

And what if your opponent doesn't take the bait and displace you? And what of those displaced and newly birthed pieces? What if you don't like any of the adjacent routes? Well, here's the great thing - pieces you place (or that are displaced) are not married to their homes. The fifth and final type of action (after claiming routes, placing pieces, placing with a displacement, and replenishing stock) is arguably the most interesting: for an action, you get to move two of your pieces from houses on any route to open houses on any other route. This is tremendously powerful; making pieces fungible this way enables blocking to become something like a market: if someone wants to take a route, you can park your pieces there and make them "pay" you to get out of it. You can then take that payment and claim your own routes with them.

Brilliantly, this avoids the prisoner's dilemma of a bash-the-leader situation. In many other high-interactivity games,

Those five actions constitute every single "action" a player takes. It's the route-claiming that unlocks powers, but as I mentioned, at the beginning of the game, you get two actions per turn, you can bag for three pieces to replenish your stock, and you can move two pieces around. However, by claiming routes leading to certain cities, you can upgrade any of the respective abilities. Inevitably, the action city Gottingen sees a run on it at the beginning of the game - the jump from two actions per turn to three actions is immense. With only two routes leading into it and three spots on each route, it immediately becomes a clusterfuck of blocking, moving, and attempts to claim it. Then there's the move upgrade; claim this route, and you have the option of getting yourself a new merchant (which has double-whammy bonus of being twice as expensive to displace, and twice as beneficial to have displaced). Moving your pieces also becomes a greater threat when you can move three instead of two pieces; most routes require three pieces or more to claim.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness