LogFAQs > #942203292

It becomes immediately obvious how valuable these specific routes are in a vacuum. Indeed, everyone charges Gottingen in particular early on to upgrade their action-count. Why wouldn't everyone just keep rushing to the maximum five actions? Well, there are three awesome mitigating factors to it. The first is that for the action track in particular, this is not immediately profitable: in order to upgrade from three to four actions, you'll need to claim the route twice, as opposed to the once it took to upgrade from two to three. Because the difference between four actions and three actions is already less constricting than between three and two, the payoff drops off a lot. Next, there's opportunity cost: the longer you spend powering up, the fewer opportunities you may have to zip around the rest of the board scoring points; meanwhile, a player who claims the Gottingen route but controls the city will score several victory points off of your repeated forays for the action point.

And finally - most importantly - it's the other players' job to block your ass. If one player does manage to get five actions early on with others at three, that player will eventually win the game. However, due to the ability to block routes and make them more expensive, other players will both slow down an action-route fanatic and profit off that player's monomania. That player will eventually gain an upper hand in single-turn actions, but the advantage gained by others may present an insurmountable lead.

Okay, so that's how you power yourself up, and that's how you fight others. How does claiming a route actually result in points? You can upgrade your player board to the maximum for 16 theoretical points, but that's hilariously inefficient in the grand scheme of things if that's all you manage to accomplish. The vast majority of routes on the board do not grant power-ups. Instead, you'll want to fill them primarily to establish offices. If you possess the appropriately shaped piece (i.e. trader or merchant) and privilege, instead of upgrading your powers, you can instead send one of your traders or merchants to fill an office in one of the two endpoint cities. Privilege refers to a special, upgradable player ability. A player with the most offices in a city controls that city. Control a city, and throughout the game you'll gain a point each time anyone (including yourself) completes the route(s) leading to that city; at the end of the game, you get two more points for that control.

But you can lose that control as well. In order to control a city, you must have the most offices there. Usually, you'll only have one there. But in case of a tie, the tiebreaker is the person who last placed an office there! You may spend your time happily constructing your route and then establishing an office, only to lose control the very next time someone else claims it and establishes their own office in the same city, placing their trader in the office to the right of yours. You've earned yourself only one measly victory point and will not get the two at the end of the game. But it doesn't just become a race to get tons of offices into a city - and that's due to privilege. See, each city has pre-defined allowed offices. Only a pre-defined number of offices - between one and six in the base game - can be established in a city, and they're locked behind privilege. The first open office spot is usually white (the lowest level). But after that, to fill an office, you must upgrade your privilege track on a route leading to Stade. You can try to rush around the board claiming lots of white offices, but without upgrading that privilege, you'll find yourself losing that control quickly to people who invested in privilege.

If it seems like I dug an unusually high amount into the tactics and strategy of the game here, it's because Hansa Teutonica truly has what they call emergent gameplay. Because of the chaos in a 2+ player game and the vastness of your options on each turn, it is nowhere near as abstract and dry as a game like Go or Chess (or yes, Hive). But there are still vast strategic options and near-zero luck (other than bonus-tile draw). And the game is transparent enough that after a single play - or before it ends - people are realizing what they could have done better, would do better in a next play, and can still do better in the current game. And due to the limited number of actions per turn with zero "cleanup phase" and high interference, even normally AP-prone players can take relatively snappy turns. You can attempt to play Hansa Teutonica solitaire, but the joy in it comes from maneuvering and identifying what's cheapest, who's likely to kick you (and gift you free pieces). What's the best valuation? What's the best play? All this in a game that can easily end in sixty minutes.

I didn't even get into Bonus Tiles, probably a necessary mechanism to incentivize people to go for otherwise seemingly low-value routes. They're maybe the least elegant and perhaps most slightly broken element of the design. But with players' ability to clog bonus tile routes as well, that isn't really a big strike against the game as a whole.
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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