New to Me – July 2018

I know this is very late, but it’s been a sad time in the Cult of the New to Me headquarters.

There was a bit of an insurrection with our Cult member over doctrine and my leadership, and because…I know this is heresy and everything…

I ONLY PLAYED ONE NEW GAME IN JULY.

It was pretty brutal. There were pitchforks and torches involved.

Thankfully, I survived and am still cult leader.

For now.

I promised to do better in August.

With only one game on the list, this will be a very brief post.

So without further adieu (all of my adieu was lost in a trading office somewhere between Hanover and Minden by some incompetent lackey), let’s get this show on the road!

Hansa Teutonica (2009 – Z-Man Games) – 1 play

Designer: Andreas Steding

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

2-5 players

Hansa Teutonica is a game where you are trying to build up trading networks among a bunch of German cities as part of the Hanseatic League, an alliance of merchant guilds and other associations that started organically in lower Germany in the middle of the 12th century.

Hey, at least it’s not in the Mediterranean!!!

You start with a player board and a bunch of cubes (sorry, traders) and one disc (sorry, merchant) and you can get more as the game goes on. As you improve items on your player board, you earn the trader/merchant that you removed from that item and will be able to use it.

You have a “supply” (traders/merchants you can place) and a “stock” (where the rest of your pieces are and can’t be used until you move them to your supply)

These, you will be placing on the board to establish trade routes between German cities, taking control of cities and routes for points.

Your player board shows a number of different areas that you can improve during the game if you complete a trade route connecting certain cities. I’m not going to go into detail on what each of these is, but one of them is to increase the number of actions you can take on a turn.

You start the game being able to take two actions (and can get up to five actions if you improve the action area to it’s maximum), which consist of the following (you can do an action more than once as long as you have the available actions):

• Take Income: move a certain number of traders/merchants from your stock to your supply so you can use them
• Place a trader or merchant on a trading house on the board (not a city, but a house on a trade route between cities)
• Displace another player from a trading house on a route. This takes two traders (or three if you’re displacing a merchant) – one to put on the now-vacated house and one that you have to “spend” back into your stock. You have to spend two traders to displace a merchant.
• Move your own traders from one house to another. The number of traders you can move depends on how much you’ve improved this action on your player board.
• Claim a route – the route must consist of only your trader/merchants. Players with offices in the connected cities get points when this happens.

I’m not going to go into the gory details of playing the game, but let’s just say there are a lot of ways to get points and if you don’t concentrate on a couple of them, then you’re not going to do well.

I know from experience.

There are also bonus markers that you can get when you claim the route they are attached to. These can do a bunch of awesome things that I wouldn’t know about because I didn’t collect any of them. Once claimed, a new bonus marker is put out on a route somewhere on the board where there are no traders currently.

Once somebody hits 20 points, you run out of bonus markers, or a player establishes an office in their 10th city, the game ends.

Twenty points, eh? That doesn’t sound like much. Low-scoring game, right?

Nope, of course not.

You get a lot of points based on a variety of factors after the game ends. The winner of my first game won with 59 points.

I did really like this game, though as with most of these “different avenues to victory” games I didn’t concentrate well enough and thus I sucked at everything.

It’s a pretty dry game of placing cubes on the board, taking them off, and just trying to get points.

And yet it was kind of mesmerizing.

Maybe watching the Heavy Cardboard playthrough before playing helped with that.

I really want to try this game again now that I’ve played it once. Maybe I will be able to concentrate a little better and do well.

Or, as usual, I will find another way to spread myself too thin and once again get nothing accomplished.

But I will have had fun doing it!

What new games did you play in July?

Let me know in the comments.