LogFAQs > #942203327

Experience - I first played Hansa Teutonica at Origins last year. It was an innocuous try at their old gaming library, which missed some of the hotter stuff I might have wanted to try. Having heard this was good and mean, I sat and learned the rules from an atrocious rulebook. I then brought it to a group of five of my friends, who found it just okay. Eventually in that game, I started hammering the action route and got to five actions, then started upgrading my board with a route that I owned. I won by a wide margin, with more than one opponent distantly behind. People found it... mostly meh. I saw potential.

Later at the same con, one of those friends, two more, and I took the same game and played a four-player game. This game went considerably faster given that two of us knew what we were doing. And also notably, I attempted to employ the same strategy: rushing to five actions. People noticed what I was doing and, instead of blocking me, attempted to copy it. My friend who'd previously played also did that, but first spent a turn to gain control of Gottingen. I protested against everyone who was aping my strategy - can't you see you're feeding him points?! But it was no good - we hammered that city, and he raked a bunch in. Now eight to twelve points won't be game-breaking usually, but because he was gaining those points so early in the game and because of the 20-in-game-VP-limit timer, this meant that I had incredibly limited time to make use of all the actions I'd just piled up. I was unable to capitalize on the action advantage as the game slipped away too quickly to make up the VP deficit.

That game went snappily and unpredictably, and to my delight, it led to a rematch. In this rematch, a different friend staked out an office in Gottingen. However, this time, seeing what happened last time, people were both more reticent to go hard on actions. This might lead the controller of Gottingen to repeatedly claim the action route himself, but everyone else, seeing this, clogged the routes leading into it, making that strategy a non-starter. This third game was much heavier on blocking and moving and attempting to build routes and exploit other opportunities for scoring. And that is how we started to see the true brilliance of the game: it emerged when we saw the amount of impact we could have on a metagame.

I believe a Big Box printing of Hansa Teutonica was issued earlier this year, at the time of Origins, it was out of print. No worry. I immediately went and paid approximately double price to have it shipped to the USA from Poland. It was that good. It's almost certainly the longest, deepest strategy game that anyone asks to play more than once in one sitting. (Five-player games sensibly take longer to complete than four or three, which are historically more common counts for me.) I've had at least five game nights where Hansa Teutonica was played twice. It's unheard of, and it's clear to see why.

Future - While I'm not sure about HT ranking #1 overall, I am certain it's #1 in the non-social/party category, with a bullet. It's a shame it doesn't really play two players, which means it has gotten zero play during quarantine. The couple I play with most will be moving out of my city before the end of quarantine, so I don't know when I'll next play. But whenever that moment comes, I'm looking forward to this bad boy returning to the table. I don't know how long HT can hold the #1 spot - it could lose it to Time's Up again, for instance - but just writing about it reminded me of why I love it so much.
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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