Review of Hansa

Hansa is an abstract trading game by Michael Scacht.

Players: 2-4
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Hansa comes with:

• 1 map
• wood bits:
  • 1 merchant ship
  • 60 market booths
• cardboard bits:
  • 78 goods markers
  • 4 moneybag tokens
  • 22 talers
• 1 rulebook

Map: The gameboard depicts the area around the Baltic sea in the 14th century. It’s just two panels, but still fairly large. It’s printed on solid linen-textured cardboard. The entire map is printed in fairly muted ochres and dirty blues, but it overall looks like a very nice period piece, quite appropriate for the theme.

The heart of the board is its depiction of 9 cities, from Tonsberg to Riga. Each has one to two adjoining warehouses and also one to three arrows which show trade routes to other cities. These are all very clear and easy to discern (though for the first couple of rounds of gameplay, a couple of players kept trying to move in the wrong direction down unidirectional arrows).

Wood Bits: The ship is a detailed, unpainted wooden miniature. The 60 market booths are wooden discs, 15 painted in each of the 4 player colors: gray, white, gold, and purple.

Cardboard Bits: These are all full-color pieces, printed on thick linen-textured cardboard. The goods markers are medium size discs that come in six different colors and each clearly depict 1, 2, or 3 barrels. The moneybag tokens are extra large discs which each depict 1 player color on a money bag. They’re intended to "hold" the Talers before a player uses them. The Talers are also medium-size discs and simply depict a gold coin front and back.

Rulebook: The rulebook is just four page long, printed in full-color on glossy paper. Fully half of the book is taken up by full-color, illustrated examples, which make the game extremely easy to play. Overall, these rules are quite well done.

Box & Tray: The box, although long is remarkably thin, which is really nice given how oversized most boxes are. The tray is just an indentation in the middle of the box, which is unfortunately pretty useless for keeping everything separated; you'll need plastic bags.

As a whole Hansa holds to the same high production standards of most German-produced games. The components are simple, but aesthetically pleasing as a whole, with particular kudos offered to the era-appropriate map and the well-exemplified rules. I've thus ranked it an above average "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of Hansa is to build an extensive network of market booths and use those booths to sell goods.

Setup: At the start of the game each player is given 15 market booths, a moneybag tile, and 3 Talers. One good marker is placed face-up in each warehouse on the board, and the remaining goods markers are stacked in 5 approximately equal piles, face-down. The ship is placed in Copenhagen.

Order of Play: Each round a player takes the following actions on his turn:

1. Take Income
2. Replenish Goods
3. Take Actions
4. Pay Taxes & Tolls

Take Income: A player gets 3 Talers at the start of his round, which he places on his moneybag.

Replenish Goods: Goods are located on the board in warehouses adjacent to cities. There's either one or two warehouses adjacent to each city. Just one good is placed in each warehouse, and they'll get taken during play. In order to refill all the empty warehouses on the board, a player must spend one Taler at the start of his turn. The warehouses are refilled using the goods that are stacked on the side of the board.

Take Actions: The heart of a turn. A player may take no more than one action in the city where the merchant ship is currently located. He may also move the ship to other cities, and then take no more than one action in each of these--the only limit on ship moves and city actions are the resources required to take these actions (Talers, goods, and market booths). Possible city actions are: purchase goods; set up market booths; and sell goods.

Purchase Goods. A player may spend 1 Taler to purchase one goods marker from a warehouse in his current city. (Recall that each of these goods markers is in one of six colors and has a value from 1 to 3 barrels.) The purchase price is paid to the bank unless one player controls a simple majority of booths in the city, in which case the price is given to that player.

Set up Market Booths. A player may expend one goods marker to set up new market booths in the current city. He places one booth for each barrel depicted on the goods he used. The goods marker used is discarded.

Sell Goods. A player may sell goods only if he has at least one market booth in the current city. He may sell any number of goods provided that he has at least two markers of each individual goods color that he wants to sell (usually a player will sell just 2 or 3 of the same color, as it's hard to get ahold of more goods at one time). The goods marker used is placed face down in front of the player and will later be used for scoring.

There are two additional consequences for selling goods. First, the player loses one of his market booths in the current city. Second, each other player loses one goods marker of each color sold, if he has any goods markers of that color.

Move the Ship. Any turn will involve lots of ship movement, before and after various actions. Moving the ship costs 1 Taler which is paid to the bank. The ship can be moved to any city directly connected to the current city with an arrow that points from the current city to the new city. (Some cities offer a decent amount of movement choice, while others force a move, such as from Riga to Danzig or from Lubeck to Aalborg.)

Pay Taxes & Tolls: At the end of his turn a player must discard any Talers he has over 3 and any goods he has over 3.

Ending the Game: The play continues until replenishing goods causes one or more goods markers to be taken from the last of the five goods marker piles. Play then continues until everyone in the game has had an equal number of turns, after which final scoring is done.

Final scoring is slightly complex. Each player gets:

• 2 points / city in which they have at least one market booth.
• 4 points / city in which they have a monopoly on market booths.
• 1 point / unsold good.
• 1 pont + number of barrels depicted / sold good.

The player with the most points wins.

How the Game Plays

The play of Hansa is somewhat opaque, as it isn't immediately obvious how goods and booths are individually valued, and what are strategic actions and what aren't, but this starts to smooth out as you've played through your first game.

When play begins a number of goods appear face-up on the board. Early players will look at those goods and immediately begin moving the ship to secure the most valuable ones. As turns progress goods purchases will be based on: whether they're high number of barrels; whether the player already has a matching good of that color; and whether other players have goods of that color.

Once a player acquires goods he tends to trade them in for market booths if they're low value. If they're high value he will typically trade them in if he doesn't see an opportunity to get a second good of the same color, but he'll try and make a pair to sell if at all possible. Sometimes, selling can be frustratingly impossible because the ship just isn't close enough to cities where you have market booths.

Throughout the game the ship sweeps back and forth between the west and east halves of the board, sometimes circling around certain triangles of trade (e.g. Copenhagen-Lubeck-Aalborg), but just as frequently covering the majority of the west and the east every couple of turns.

There also tends to be some alternation of activity level for a player. Typically there will be some rounds where a player takes just a couple of actions, saving up Talers, followed by sweeping rounds in which he does quite a bit.

Toward the end of the game players tend to start concentrating on two important facts: getting market booths into any cities where they don't have a presence and selling off as many goods as possible.

Relationships to Other Games

Hansa is a trading game with minor aspects of set collection and majority control. There's also a simple action point system.

Hansa is fairly rare among trading games in that the trading is done with the game system, rather than with other players. In fact, the way the game sets up trading is very clever. There's not an actual valuation for bringing a good from one city to another, just a necessity to do so because only one action is possible when a player is sitting in a city; thus he must buy in one location, then sell in another (at least if he's buying and selling in short order). One of the few other games that I'm aware of which uses a similar basis for trade, totally arbitrated by the game system with money sometimes going to players, is Serenissima, a trading war game set around the Mediterranean rather than the Baltic.

The set collection & majority control game systems are simple enough that they're scarcely worth mentioning. Set collection, of course, is the heart of any number of card games, starting with Rummy, while majority control has been featured in many games following in the footsteps of the foundational El Grande.

Finally, we come to the action point system, which I find exceedingy clever. A lot of games--starting with Tikal, Torres, and others by Wolfgang Kramer, and also including recent releases like Trias--feature an action point system: you can do a variety of actions during a turn, each with a varying cost, with your total action ability bounded by a pool of action points. This is essentially what the Talers mark in Hansa. However, unlike most action point systems, you can save a limited number of Talers from one round to the next, thus allowing you to effectively vary the number of action points you spend in any turn based on whether you can do effective moves that turn or not. Very cool.

The Game Design

Hansa is an elegant game design that has all the feeling of an abstract game design, but nonetheless has a theme that really fits the mechanics. Here's some of the better game design elements:

Superb Tactics: The game of Hansa is almost entirely tactical--you figure out a best move once you see the state of the board on your turn--but those tactics are very well done. Between the three different potential actions, and the variety of goods available at all the nearby towns, you have a lot of potential for meaningful and different moves on your turn. I really can't overstate how much the tactical core of this game shines.

Nice Limitations: A number of nice limitations (taxes, tolls, movement arrows) help keep the game sufficiently bounded to keep the number of tactical possibilities reasonable.

Nicely Thematic: As noted already, the game has the feel of an abstract game: the mechanics are a very strong influence on the game. Despite that, the theme melds very well; it's a rare case of strong mechanics really modelling a particular milleu to a tee.

Here's some of my concerns about the game:

Tactics Initially Opaque: The balance between market booths, Talers, and goods will really not be obvious to a first-time player until (possibly) the end of the game. I'd definitely put Hansa into the category of Advanced Strategy as a result; this doesn't feel like a casual or family game.

Somewhat Simplistic: The core gameplay is ultimately somewhat simplistic. There's definitely plenty of strategic grist, but I think the core simplicity may limit same-session replayability of the game (e.g., it's unlikely you'll spend a whole night playing this game).

AP Prone: This is a game that is prone to Analysis Paralysis if you have players in your group with that predilection. Typically you want to plot our 4 or 5 moves at the start of your turn, to expend your current group of Talers. The limitations mentioned above help a lot, but there's still potential here for paralysis.

Overall, Hansa is a well-designed game that surprised me with its interesting tactics. I originally gave it a "4" out of "5" for Substance with the comment that I might bump it to "5" when I've played it enough to understand it better. I'm not convinced that I understand it well yet, but after many plays I do think it's a deep, enjoyable, and very replayable game, and that it particularly stands out given its short-to-medium length. In retrospect, it's been one of the hits of 2004.

Conclusion

Thus far, Hansa is one of my favorite board game releases for 2004 (other have been Oasis, Ticket to Ride, and Tongiaki). It's already looking to me like this year is going to be a great one for gaming releases.

However, Hansa is probably the hardest sell out of that group of games I've mentioned. It's a real gamer's game that doesn't have a lot of socialization and which requires careful tactical thinking. If you like very strategic or tactical games, you'll be very pleased with this one; if you're looking for lighter or more casual fare, this probably isn't the right game for you.