Home

Spiel.co.uk

Games Session

No Mark K this week, so we managed to try out a couple of the four player games recently released at Nurmberg. Hansa is another elegant release from Michael Schacht, about trading at ports around the Baltic Sea.

The game board shows 9 different cities on a map of the Baltic region and each city contains one or two warehouses into which goods of six different colours are made available for sale. There is one merchant ship which travels between the ports and trade can only occur at the port where the ship is situated. On their turn, players can buy a good available at the active port's warehouses, set up a market booth at that port or sell goods previously acquired providing he has previously established a market booth at that port. The twist is that the player can perform only one action at each port so, if you establish a market booth  you can't sell goods at that booth on the same turn. When you do sell, you must have at least two goods markers of the same colour, and you will lose a market booth in the city where you sell. However, the sale allows you to bank those goods until the end of the game and these produce bonus victory points. You also get VPs for each city in which you have a market booth and 1 VP for each unsold goods marker you possess.