Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is a post-apocalyptic story set in a reserve in Northern Ontario. One day, the cell phones and satellite TV stop working. No big deal, that happens sometimes. They’ll probably come back in a day or two. The next day, the internet is down. That’s odd, but again, not really abnormal in this remote village. The next day, the power goes out. It used to go out all the time, but that hasn’t really happened in the last three years, not since the big hydro project connected them to the main grid. Then when a week goes by and the power still hasn’t returned, and winter is looming, the town has to figure out how to survive.
I’ll be honest about my bias here: I grew up in a village in northern Manitoba, and no book has made me feel more at home than this one. The community relationships, the way the characters talked to each other, even referencing “The Northern Store” as the only grocery store in town, is super reminiscent of my hometown. Rice absolutely nailed the feeling of what a remote northern community feels like.
The writing in the book made me feel right at home. On the Rez, in this community of Anishinaabe in northern Ontario, away from the cities, the locals manage to live their lives, feed their families, and some try to keep their heritage alive. some of the language, the rituals surrounding hunting, and looking out for the elderly. Things aren’t always perfect, some people are more content to play video games all day rather than going hunting to fill their freezer for the upcoming winter. And they’ve had their share of tragedies, but life goes on here, even after the lights go dark. The band tries to keep people calm as a low sense of panic sets in. The store shelves are pretty much empty the next day, but no worries. A delivery of food is scheduled for next week, everyone has enough food to keep them until then.
A dump of snow blankets the community in white, then two college students return home from the city of Gibson via ski-doo, and tell the community that power is out everywhere, and society is crumbling. There will not be any help from the outside world any time soon. Thankfully, the band has an emergency generator, a byproduct of the time before electricity was reliable in this area. But there is only so much gas to keep them going as winter is upon them. They tell everyone to ration their energy use, and most do. Some don’t, and that’s their choice. The band also has an emergency reserve of rations, and they begin sharing the food with anyone who needs it on a weekly basis. Evan, the main character is a bit dismayed at how few people managed to hunt before the winter. The community comes together to make it through this crisis.
Things begin to get haunting as a handful of people arrive from the south. They grapple with their fear of intruders with the human desire to offer aid where they can. After all, the community has enough resources to make it through the winter, what’s adding one more person to the town? Justin Scott is a large white man with a sled full of supplies. He fancies himself a survivalist and offers his skills to help the town. He quickly inserts himself into the town meetings, and sets up his own home and begins exerting his influence on those around him, including shooting another outsider as they come up to the edge of town.
There was one moment in the book, as Evan is stoking the furnace for one of the elders in the community. They talk about how everything is different, how some people are using the world apocalypse. She delivers this emotional gut punch:
“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here… But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this . . . what’s the word again?” “Apocalypse.” “Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”
I really enjoy how the book doesn’t focus on the apocalyptic event itself. We never really get an explanation for what happened, or a answer about what’s going on in the rest of the world. Instead, it focuses on the reserve as they try to survive the winter. How the band starts to divvy out emergency rations. How the able-bodied men hunt and provide for those who are unable to do so. How they have to grapple with their fear when strangers, white men, show up at their borders asking for sanctuary. How these interlopers then cause trouble.
It’s a fascinating departure from most present-day apocalypse stories, which are usually about the crumbling of societal structures and social order. How the Lord of the Flies rules and “might makes right” quickly takes over. These stories always have us watching characters suddenly lose access to the systems they and their parents and grandparents have used their entire lives, like electricity and indoor plumbing, or a local grocer as a supply of food. We watch characters try to figure out how to survive without them, and defend themselves from those who want to take what they’ve built.
But Moon of the Crusted Snow has a different point of view. The ‘apocalypse’ comes on slowly and things only kind of fall apart, because the Anishinaabe community is already separated from traditional society, they’ve already survived multiple world shattering tragedies, this is just another world shifting event. Perhaps even less terrible than the ones that came before.
Losing power and phone service doesn’t immediately incite mass chaos and triggers everyone base survival modes, because they’re already used to going without those amenities. The culture of preparing your home for the cold winter still lives on in some people, so when the grocery stores go bare, the already have the skills and habits required to survive. The older generation just scoffs as the youngers panic, and remind them they didn’t have electricity for their entire childhood, and they turned out just fine.
While there is an ever-present looming sense of danger, I found the narrative of the community staying together and adjusting to this new way of life a much more interesting apocalypse story than simply watching civilization collapse. It made me think about my uncles in my home town who would deliver caribou meat to my house in the fall, and how that small town that I was so keen to leave is probably better off in the event of a disaster.
Moon of the Crusted Snow was just a great, haunting story. I really enjoyed it, and I’m really looking forward to reading the next book in the series. More than anything, though, I appreciated how familiar this book felt to me. Obviously, I don’t have the lived experience of the Anishinaabe characters in this story, but I do know what it feels like to live in a little northern community where the nearest city is hours away, where everyone knows everyone, where the only grocery store is the Northern Store, and where a power outage isn’t necessarily an emergency, it was probably just a racoon climbing into a transformer again. Hydro will be out in the morning to get it fixed. Probably.
If you want a little fictional glimpse into what life in a northern reserve kind of feels like, give Moon of the Crusted Snow a read.
I don’t actually have a lot of time to play party games. Maybe it’s not that I don’t have a lot of time, but I rarely have the right situation for them. My game group usually meets on a Wednesday, and it’s me and two other people. The same two people who have been meeting every Wednesday for almost a decade now. Every now and then there’s a bigger event where maybe up to five people show up, but regardless, party games are not part of my regular repertoire. So when people ask me what the best party games are, I actually come up blank. I don’t know what’s new and interesting and good in the party game scene these days. Which is why I was so excited to discover Poetry for Neanderthals and how much fun it can be.
In Poetry for Neanderthals, players break up into two teams. On one team’s turn, one player will be designated as the poet, and they will have a stack of cards with a bunch of objects or concepts that they need to get the rest of their team to say. The twist is that the Neanderthal poet can only speak in one-syllable words. A one-minute timer is set, and the goal is to get through as many cards as possible. The other team is tasked with watching and bopping the poet if they ever use a word that is more than one syllable.
It’s surprisingly fun trying to communicate with only one-syllable words. It’s hilarious when someone gets a word like “ankle” and they stammer and stutter before finally saying, “where foot meet leg.” And that moment when you get it, that moment when you sync up with the poet, it feels like you are mad geniuses decrypting a puzzle. Of course, the alternative is when you are just so out of sync and the poet is trying desperately to lead you to where you need to be. For example, drift ended up being a stone wall that wasted one teams entire turn. The poet was saying, “boat move wrong. Float far bad.”, which makes a crazy kind of sense when you understand the context. But when you don’t, you just sit there and stare at your teammate incredulously. And it’s in that moment when you learn that the person you’re talking to, the person you’re trying to lead to the word drift has never stepped foot on a boat before. They have no context for what a ‘bad float’ is. it turns out that they’re a car engineer and if you had gone with “car turn too fast, small spin” they would have shouted drift in milliseconds that makes you burst out with a belly full of laughter.
There are rules for keeping score and how to end the game and who wins and who loses, but I have always been of the opinion that those things, those rules, don’t make party games better. The point of party games is to engage your friends and to create laughter, and just playing *Poetry for Neanderthals* does that very well. It makes people laugh. It makes people exclaim when they get the right answer. It makes people debate on whether a permit should be along the same lines as a driver’s license as opposed to a construction permit. And honestly, those moments are the game.
Poetry for Neanderthals is very simple to play. Everyone knows what one-syllable words are, and yet it’s surprisingly hard to keep yourself from using a two-syllable word because a two-syllable word might be exactly the perfect thing you need to say. But you need to figure out a way around it, and then inevitably, when you slip up, you get a playful bop on the head with an inflatable club. At the end of the day, it’s exactly what I want my party game to be: light, fun, casual, and something that makes people laugh. All I should really say here is: game very good time.
I suppose re-theming an existing game can be a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, re-theming an existing game means that you have a built-in audience. Plenty of people have already played the game, Lots of reviews for the game already exist on BGG, it’s a known quantity. I would assume that means it’s easier to sell, just by the virtue of people having already played it, but you’ve given the game a new coat of paint and made it widely available. The downside is however, that no matter what you do, if you make any changes at all, suddenly the new edition will forever be compared to its predecessor. The discourse around your game will be consumed with debates over old vs new themes. I saw it happen with Stonemaier Games reimplementation of Libertalia, and I saw it happen again with For the King (and Me), designed by Steve Finn and published by IELLO in 2021.
For the King (and Me) is a re-theme of Steve Finn’s previous game Biblios. In Biblios, players are monks trying to gain majorities in different categories of books. It’s a small but attractive little game, albeit a little dark with its monastery aesthetic. For the King (and Me) has a much brighter colour palette, and the cover features a young, naive king surrounded by a bunch of cartoonishly scheming advisors. The theme of this game is that you’re trying to manipulate your position with the king to earn yourself a bevy of titles, which will earn player prestige, and the person with most prestige from their titles at the end of the game is the winner.
The game takes place over a series of turns. On your turn, you will take cards equal to the number of players plus one and look at them one at a time. When you look at a card, you choose to either put it in a face down auction pile, place it face up in a row for your fellow advisors to pick from, or put it face down for yourself to keep. Once you look at a card and put it into its spot, you can’t move it anymore, meaning if you choose to put the first card you draw into your pile to keep, none of the other cards that you’ll draw for the rest of this turn will be eligible to be put into your own pile. Once you’ve drawn all the cards and allocated them appropriately, the player to your left will pick the first one from the public market you just created, and then it goes around the table until all those cards are picked. Then the next player takes their turn, preforming the same ritual. And around and around the game goes until the deck runs out of cards, and players then proceed to the auction portion of the game.
Before I continue though, it’s important to know what the cards do. The cards that you’re picking from will either be colours, red, blue, purple, pink, orange, or green, and each of those coloured cards will have a number. At the very end of the game, you will compare your sum of each colour to each other player, and whoever has the most points wins the associated title. There’s a second-place award to win as well. Another card type in the deck will let players modify the prestige value of the titles, either pushing them up or down in value, and sometimes allowing a player to modify one or two titles at a time. I suppose it’s important to mention that when you do this, you’re really modifying the higher-value title, as the second-place title’s value is always half the value of the main title, rounded down.
Lastly, there are gold cards you can acquire, which are used in the auction phase of this card drafting game. Once the deck runs out, the next player in turn order takes the top card of the face down pile and reveals it to the table. Starting with the player to their left, Each player calls out a sum of gold that they’re willing to spend to acquire that card. If the card revealed is a gold card, then players can bid a number of cards they want to discard to acquire that gold. Once that pile of cards is exhausted, everyone reveals the sums of each of the colours and claims their titles. The player with the most prestige points from their collected titles is the winner.
As a production, I like the art and colour a lot more than the more serious-themed Biblios. I like seeing caricatures of goofy advisors with high eyebrows, regal moustaches, and pompous grey wigs. I really enjoy the cartoony aspect of it. It leans into the goofiness of the whole scenario. I found the cardboard title tiles on the centre board to be more annoying than anything else. Every time someone modifies the value of one of those tiles, you are supposed to take the title tile off the board and put a new one with its new value in its place. And because the lower title value is always half rounded down of the higher value total, sometimes you’d be adjusting two tile titles at the same time. It’s just a lot of shuffling little cardboard bits around. And I probably wouldn’t even complain about this if the predecessor Biblios didn’t have a more elegant solution in dice. When modifying values, its just easier to rotate a die to represent a new value than it is to swap out two cardboard tokens. We were saying at the table that it would make a lot of sense to have a large die and a smaller die and just use that instead of all those titles. Now, that said, the titles do have a little bit of flair on them, saying what title you receive. As a small example, you could be the Royal Pillow Fluffer or the Poultry Plucker, and that’s kind of cute, and I appreciate that. But I still think dice would have been the way to go for this kind of game.
The gameplay is as simple as it gets, you’re literally just flipping cards and picking where to put them, but you do get some tense decisions. The moments when you reveal a mid-range colour card of a set you’ve been collecting, you have to ask yourself: “Is that worth keeping?” And then you choose to keep it, and the next reveal is the highest-value card of the colour you just took. ARGH! You just kind of shot yourself in the foot a little bit. The alternative is you put that one into the auction pile, and the rest of the cards you draw for the round are useless to you. Such consternation!
There’s a good mix of known and unknown information, and depending on how good you are at tracking what players take when drawing from the face up cards, you can get a good sense on what other players have. Sure, maybe you can let that one blue go away because you’re sure that player didn’t have any blue before this, and you a couple blue cards in your hand, so you feel pretty safe. But because players are taking cards face down, you never actually know what everyone has. The auction is equally tense. When a card comes up that you really want, you try to bid low and hope to get it for a discount, but then the players next to you bid as well, jumping the value to unreasonable heights. It can sting.
Just like in Biblios, I love in theory the mechanic of increasing and decreasing the value of the titles. It’s a really cool and interesting to have the value of what you’re working towards to be constantly in flux. In practice, I find that most of the values actually come out in the wash. Someone tries to pump up red, the next player just pushes it right back down. And because there’s an equal number of positives and negatives, most things end up being staying roughly the same. I don’t feel there’s very much room for clever plays. Especially when the luck of the draw is so prevalent. Maybe scoring one of those cards near the end of the auction can swing the game a bit, but I don’t think it ends up being particularly impactful in the end. Maybe at a lower player count, where each player has more control, more opportunities to pump a value, or if multiple players team up to really take down the value of a specific colour, but in my experience this rarely comes to fruition.
One big change from Biblios is the existence of second place. In Biblios, only the player who has the majority in each colour wins anything. Here, second place gets a half-value prize, rounded down, meaning two players might actually team up to increase the value of a colour, and it’s more likely that players will spread themselves more thin trying to get more second-place values. Hopefully this will encourage players to use the +/-1 cards for good and not evil. After all, more points is always more fun than less points.
At the end of the day, For the King (and Me) is a fun and light game. Biblios is the perfect game to begin or end game night because it plays in half an hour and encourages interaction between players. It’s fun to steal the majority from someone, or when you see someone really going hard on one colour, you tank the value of that title. You may not have as much control as I might prefer in a game, but it’s over in half an hour, and it’s a generally good time. If you have been sad that Biblios is unavailable, For the King (and Me) is a pretty great replacement.
By this point, you probably know that I’m a fan of word games. From Hardback to Paperbackto Paperback Adventures to Bananagrams and Illiterati, I enjoy word games quite a bit, and I enjoy discovering new ones. I know there are books and books of word games, and dozens of apps with daily word puzzles that I could be playing, but I’m always fascinated by how many different games there are to play using nothing more than letters and words. Half the fun for me is simply discovering another take on such a familiar idea.
Letter Tycoon has players making words with cards. Each player starts with seven letter cards in hand, and there are three common cards available in the middle of the table. On your turn, you can use as many of those common letters as you want to make a word. Depending on how long your word is, you’ll earn money which is points. The only thing you use your money for is to buy patents. Patents are really the heart of the game because some of them will give you persistent abilities for the rest of the game.
Most patents simply give you an extra cent whenever another player uses one of your letters. Naturally, that means you should probably grab the E, T, A, O, and I patents first. They’re more expensive, of course, but they also seem like they’ll pay for themselves over the course of the game. The less common letters like Q, W, and X are cheaper, but they usually come with unique powers as well. Some let you double the money you earn from a word, while another lets you create two words in a single turn. There are some neat ideas in the patent system, and I do like the feeling of gradually building a little engine around the letters you own.
The goal is ultimately to accumulate wealth. The game ends once someone reaches the wealth threshold, which is calculated using both the money they have on hand and the value of the patents they’ve purchased. Buying an expensive patent doesn’t actually reduce your wealth because its purchase price counts as part of your assets. It’s kind of like buying a house. Yes, you spend a lot of money, but you also gain an asset that’s theoretically worth the same amount. Well… maybe that’s not the best comparison these days.
Letter Tycoon is an interesting concept, but it falls short compared to many of the other word games I’ve played recently, especially Hardback. The biggest issue for me is randomness. You’re drawing back up to seven cards every round, and sometimes you just draw a terrible hand. There were turns where I had a single vowel available between all ten letters I could use, and there were other turns where it felt like I had nothing but O’s and U’s. Sometimes a bad draw simply means you don’t have a worthwhile turn, and that kind of sucks.
Another issue is that there are no wild cards. You’re completely beholden to the ten letters available to you. Maybe those letters don’t let you spell anything useful. Maybe they don’t let you create a word long enough to afford the patent you wanted. That’s probably uncommon, but the possibility exists, and it’s frustrating. Coming from games like Hardback and Paperback, it’s hard not to compare them. Paperback always has a common vowel available, while Hardback lets you turn any card into a wild. Those little design decisions give you just enough freedom to make the words you want to make, or at least turn a bad hand into something salvageable. I never quite felt that same flexibility here.
Another reason the game frustrates me is that you simply earn more money for making bigger words. There’s nothing really pushing you toward making interesting words or finding clever combinations of patents. You just make the biggest word you can because bigger words equal more money. Yes, to buy a patent you have to use a letter in your word, but you’ll rarely be blocked out of buying patents due to none existing for the letters you just used. Compare that to Hardback, where you might deliberately use certain letters because they synergize with one another or because they activate special abilities. Here, having a larger vocabulary is simply better. I’m not terribly against that in principle, but it also feels like the design could have done something more interesting with the letters.
I guess that’s where a lot of my frustration comes from. I’ve played a lot of great word games, so when I play one that hasn’t really solved these issues, I notice it immediately. That’s probably a little unfair. Not every word game needs to solve problems the same way, and not every game should copy Hardback. But after seeing other designs tackle these issues so elegantly, it’s difficult not to miss those ideas when they’re absent.
My next criticism is that individual games don’t really feel that different from one another. Every time you sit down to Letter Tycoon, the only thing that’s changing is the letters in your hand. There’s no real arc to the experience. Sure, you might pick up a couple of powers that let you double your earnings or make two words, but for the most part you’re simply using ten letters to make words over and over until someone accumulates enough wealth to end the game. I never got the feeling that I was discovering new strategies or that future plays would unfold much differently than the previous one.
I will say that I really enjoy the artwork. All of the patent cards are illustrated as blueprints for different inventions and technologies, and they look great on the table. It’s a small thing, but I appreciated the presentation every time I looked at a new patent.
I think Letter Tycoon is worth trying once. I don’t think there are many hidden strategies waiting to be uncovered, and I don’t think there are many reasons for me to come back after a play or two. If you don’t have a large vocabulary, you’ll simply do worse, and unfortunately there are plenty of other word games that offer more interesting decisions, more variety between plays, or better ways to reward clever use of shorter words instead of simply making the longest word possible.
At the end of the day, I played Letter Tycoon twice on Board Game Arena, and I think that’s where I’m going to leave this one. It has a few neat ideas, particularly with the patent system, but when I have so many stronger word games on my shelf, it’s hard to justify coming back.
Hansa Teutonica has got to be one of the most uninviting board games around. Granted, it came out in 2009, but in a market where every game has bright, vibrant, beautiful artwork on full display, here’s Mr. Beige Boy with his stupid little moustache staring morosely at the player as he signs his tax documents. And yet, Hansa Teutonica has endured because its gameplay is so interactive and interesting. This is the quintessential example of “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
In Hansa Teutonica, players are members of the Hanseatic League trying to spread their influence by establishing routes of traders and merchants. On your turn, you’ll place a number of your pieces onto spaces between towns on the board. If every space on a route is your colour, you can claim that route and establish your influence in one of the trade houses at either end.
If someone happens to be in your way (and trust me, they will be in your way a lot), you can bump players off their space on a route. Displacing people is a core part of the game. It costs you, though. When you place one of your cubes in a spot where an opposing cube already lays, you must discard an extra cube from your supply into the general stock. Then the displaced player gets to place the kicked out cube, plus an extra cube onto an adjacent path. This feels like a huge cost, giving your opponent an extra token on the board, but you know what they say. A cube on a prime route is worth two on other routes.
Once a route belongs entirely to you, you can spend an action to claim it. Whoever has the most recent trading post in the trade houses connected to that route earns points, and then you have a decision to make. You can establish a trading post by placing one of your markers into a trade office beside the route, potentially scoring points every time that route is completed in the future. Alternatively, if the route is connected to one of the guild houses, you can instead improve one of your abilities. These upgrades remove pieces from your player board, increasing the number of pieces available in your supply while also making your actions stronger. It’s one of those satisfying upgrades where you don’t really feel like you’re giving anything up. There’s also a third option available on one specific route that lets you place one of your discs onto the board for an immediate point bonus. Regardless of which option you choose, every cube on that completed route is removed from the board and returned to the general supply.
A big part of the game revolves around establishing yourself in those trade offices and guild houses scattered across the map. One of the biggest scoring opportunities comes from being the first player to connect the left side of the board to the right, rewarding players who expand efficiently across the entire network rather than simply fighting over one corner.
The other major source of points comes from controlling those trade offices. Whenever someone completes a route next to a trade office you control, you score a point. That can become incredibly lucrative. One of my favourite spots to grab is the trade office beside the route that allows players to upgrade their actions. That route gets completed over and over throughout the game because everyone wants those upgrades. Instead of placing their own marker into the office, they’ll usually take the upgrade instead, and every single time they do, they’re quietly feeding you points.
And that decision itself, the short-term gain of upgrading your actions versus the long-term investment of claiming that trade office, is absolutely delicious. There are decisions like that scattered all throughout Hansa Teutonica. How often should you bump opponents, knowing it costs you an extra worker while giving them an extra worker in return? How often should you intentionally get in someone’s way, hoping they’ll eventually bump you off so you can place two cubes with a single action? Sometimes that first placement is almost a sacrifice. You’re betting that another player will follow through with the route you expect them to take. Of course, if they suddenly pivot somewhere else, you’re left with one lonely worker languishing on a forgotten route, wondering what could have been.
As the game goes on, everyone becomes more powerful. Players earn more actions, their actions become stronger, and the pace of the game accelerates dramatically. One of the upgrades lets you move workers already on the board. Getting cubes onto the board in the first place can be expensive, but once they’re out there, they’re surprisingly mobile. Being able to move three workers before claiming a route lets you swoop into opportunities that didn’t even exist a turn earlier. You spend the early game building your infrastructure, and then the late game becomes this wonderful scramble where everyone is repositioning pieces and trying to capitalize on whatever opportunities appear.
And that’s really what Hansa Teutonica is all about: capitalizing on situations as they present themselves. You’re constantly watching what your opponents are doing, trying to predict where they’ll go next, and slipping just enough into their plans to gain a small edge. Maybe you occupy a key route they wanted. Maybe you establish yourself in a guild house because you’re almost certain they’ll use that adjacent route to upgrade an action. Maybe you leave a cube in just the right place, practically inviting someone to bump it because you’ll benefit slightly more from the displacement. The game ends as soon as someone reaches twenty points, and once everyone’s engines have developed, those points come surprisingly quickly. Hansa Teutonica doesn’t so much end as it comes to a screaming halt.
This game is an absolute delight to play, provided you enjoy bumping shoulders with your opponents. If your favourite Eurogames are the kind where everyone puts their head down, quietly optimizes their own little puzzle, and compares scores two hours later, this probably isn’t the game for you. Hansa Teutonica wants you paying attention to every single move everyone else makes. It wants you delighting in getting in each other’s way. It wants you relishing the opportunity to bump someone off a route or profit from their decision to improve an action instead of taking a trade office. It’s a far more interactive game than that beige board and drab cover would ever lead you to believe.
The first time I played Hansa Teutonica, the person who owned it pulled it off the shelf and casually said, “Oh, this one’s actually on my sell list. I haven’t played it yet, though, so we should probably give it one play before I get rid of it.” After we finished, he immediately took out his phone and removed the “for sale” listing. Honestly, I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. There really is a fantastic game hiding underneath that unbelievably drab presentation.
To be fair, the subsequently released Big Box Edition does improve things. The board is more colourful, the cover art is better… although only slightly better. It’s still hardly going to catch your eye from across the room, but it is easier to look at than the original. Perhaps more importantly, the rulebook is significantly improved. I had an awful time working through the original rules, trying to remember the differences between cubes and discs, what counted as supply, what was available, what wasn’t available… it was just a chore. The newer rulebook presents everything much more clearly, which makes learning the game considerably easier.
Overall, I don’t have much to complain about with Hansa Teutonica. I’ve played it quite a few times now, and I’ve enjoyed every single play. Sure, your group might eventually develop a bit of a meta around which opening routes are strongest, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Once the early game settles, strategies naturally branch off as opportunities appear, and reacting to those opportunities is what makes the game so much fun. I also think it plays better with more players than fewer. The extra interaction really brings the board to life. This is the kind of Eurogame that gets people talking, laughing, blocking each other, and generally messing with one another’s plans, and those are exactly the kinds of Eurogames I enjoy most.
Last week I talked about Gaia Project and how that game, with all of its decisions and cascading consequences, makes my brain hurt. Hansa Teutonica makes me smile. Yes, there are still plenty of meaningful decisions to make, but they’re so much less mentally taxing. There are fewer gears constantly turning in your head. Instead, the joy comes from putting down a cube, knowing you’re getting in someone’s way, looking them square in the eyes, and silently daring them to bump you off the route. Not many Eurogames encourage that kind of interaction, and I think that’s what makes Hansa Teutonica so special.
It can be difficult to review a game like Gaia Project. At this point, everyone who likes the game has already played it or already knows they like it. It feels like everyone who hasn’t played it yet has a reason. Either it’s too intimidating, or they bounced off the pedigree that Gaia Project was born from, namely Terra Mystica or Age of Innovation. It’s one of those games that has built such a reputation for itself that most people have already decided where they stand before the box even hits the table. And the people who love it, LOVE IT.
Gaia Project is a one-to-four-player resource management Euro game where players take on one of fourteen asymmetric factions and attempt to utilize their limited resources to expand their influence across the galaxy and earn the most victory points. There’s a lot to do in Gaia Project, and the game is played over six rounds. Every round, players take one action on their turn, with turns continuing around the table until each player eventually passes. Once you pass, you’re done for the round, but everyone else gets to keep going until they’ve exhausted what they can do.
One of my favourite mechanisms in the game is actually its player interaction through the power system. On your player board, each faction has these little power bowls with power tokens slowly cycling between them, Mancala style. Whenever someone builds or improves a building near one of yours, you get the opportunity to charge power. If all you have nearby is a humble little mine, you’ll get a single power charge for free. But as your buildings become more advanced, you’ll often have the option to charge two or even three power instead. The catch is that charging the extra power costs you one or two victory points.
At first that sounds completely backwards. Why would you willingly throw away points? The answer is that power lets you perform additional actions or convert it into resources that will often earn you more points than you sacrificed in the first place. It’s one of those wonderfully Euro-style decisions where you’re constantly evaluating whether a short-term loss creates a larger long-term gain.
The game starts with everyone choosing a faction. I’ve read online discussions where people argue this is where games are won and lost. Some groups will study the map before the game even starts and actually bid victory points just for the privilege of choosing factions first because they believe they can exploit that particular galaxy layout better than everyone else. Our group is nowhere near that level of meta. We simply deal two faction boards to each player and let everyone choose between those options, which honestly is more than enough decision-making for us.
Every faction has its own home planet type. One of the primary actions throughout the game is building mines, but before you can build anything, you first have to reach a planet. At the beginning of the game your ships can only reach adjacent spaces, but one of the technology tracks gradually extends that range to two, three, or even four spaces away, letting you leap across the galaxy, but I’ll touch on technology tracks in a little bit.
Of course, simply reaching a planet isn’t enough. Unless it’s your faction’s native planet type, you’ll also have to terraform it. There are seven planet types in the game, and every faction naturally lives on only one of them. Every other planet requires varying amounts of terraforming before it becomes habitable. That’s another important consideration when choosing your faction. If your faction is only one terraforming step away from the same planet types as two other factions, all three of you are going to spend the game fighting over those worlds.
So to build a mine you need to reach a planet, terraform it if necessary, and then simply pay one ore and two credits to place your mine. Once a building goes onto the board, it never leaves your control. That permanence is important because players can absolutely box one another into corners, limiting future expansion and cutting off access to sections of the galaxy. Since every building you place also uncovers additional income on your player board, every placement feels significant. Early on, each mine you put down increases your ore income, slowly growing your engine one building at a time.
Another major action is upgrading your buildings. Buildings follow a strict technology tree. Mines upgrade into trading stations, trading stations can become either planetary institutes or academies, and academies can eventually receive one final upgrade. Whenever you upgrade, the old building returns to your player board and the new building replaces it on the map. Earlier I mentioned that buildings never leave the board, and that’s still true. You’re simply replacing your own structure with a better one, retaining control of the planet you initially placed it on.
The interesting part is what happens on your player board. Returning a mine means covering up the income that mine was providing. Sure, your new trading station will earn you credits each income phase, but you’ve also just reduced your ore production by reclaiming that mine. You’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It’s also worth mentioning that upgrading a mine into a trading station costs either three credits or six credits. The cheaper cost only applies if the upgraded building will charge another player’s power, rewarding players for building near one another (and punishing those who choose to build in their own little corner of the map). Otherwise, you’re paying the full six credits. Trading stations produce more income over time, but they’re still expensive enough that timing really matters. Upgrade too early and you suddenly find yourself with fewer mines on the board and not enough ore to continue expanding. Upgrade too aggressively toward the higher-tier buildings and you may have these incredible abilities while simultaneously wondering why you’re broke all the time.
Another action is forming federations. Whenever you can connect buildings with a combined power value of seven or more, you may create a federation. If there are empty spaces between your buildings, you can bridge those gaps with satellites. Completing a federation earns you a federation token, which is usually worth a healthy chunk of points along with some useful resource bonus. More importantly, federation tokens become incredibly important later in the game.
Then there are the technology tracks. By spending four knowledge, you can advance one step on any of the game’s six technology tracks. These tracks affect all sorts of things: reducing terraforming costs, increasing your shipping range, providing Q.I.C. cubes that let you travel or terraform special planets, or unlocking Gaiaformers that let you colonize the strange purple Gaia planets that eventually become habitable. Every track pushes your engine in a different direction.
Getting to the top of a track isn’t easy. You need a federation token before you can move from the fifth to the sixth space, and when you do, you actually flip that federation token over as payment. On top of that, only one player may occupy the top, most powerful space of each technology track, so getting there first can be a huge advantage.
You can also advance these tracks by acquiring technology tiles. Building an academy lets you claim one, and these tiles vary wildly. Some provide additional income every round, some grant one-time resource boosts, and others offer entirely new bonus actions you can perform each round. Whenever you claim a standard technology tile from a row, you also advance one step on that corresponding technology track.
Near the top of the technology board are advanced technology tiles. If you’re already sitting on the fifth or sixth step of a technology track, you may claim one of these instead. They’re much stronger, but they come with two costs. First, you need to flip another federation token. Second, you have to cover one of your existing technology tiles. Sometimes that’s easy if you’re covering a one-time resource bonus you’ve already used. Other times you’re giving up an income bonus you’ve relied on all game. Every decision seems to create another decision.
There are plenty of other actions available as well, but I think by this point you probably get the idea. Gaia Project is a huge, complex board game built on interlocking systems. It’s a game about efficiency and squeezing just enough resources together to perform one more action before the round ends. A critical mistake early in the game might mean that next round you only get two or three actions before having to pass because you’ve completely starved yourself of resources. It is absolutely brutal by design.
The flipside is that when you finally unlock the puzzle, it must feel incredible. You spend six resources here, gain four resources back there, use those four resources to perform two additional actions, move up multiple technology tracks, expand across the galaxy, and somehow everything falls into place. I think that feeling is exactly why Gaia Project is so beloved. It’s the kind of game that rewards careful planning and deliberate sequencing. There isn’t random luck waiting to ruin your strategy. The only thing standing between you and victory is how well you’ve thought through your decisions.
That being said, this is absolutely not multiplayer solitaire. You cannot simply stare at your own player board and expect to do well. So many things in Gaia Project are finite, especially the real estate. Players are constantly trying to snake planets away from each other one turn earlier than expected. The shared power actions and Q.I.C. actions can only be claimed once per round, so being first and grabbing the action everyone else desperately wanted can completely swing an entire round. It’s an incredibly crunchy, cerebral experience.
So why don’t I like it?
I think my biggest problem is that I’m just not very good at Gaia Project. I am the player who reaches round two or three and suddenly realizes I only get two or three actions because I mismanaged my resources somewhere half an hour earlier. Then I spend half the game trying to recover enough income just to function again. Nearly every time I’ve played Gaia Project, I’ve come in dead last. I’m scoring around one hundred points while everyone else is sitting comfortably between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and ninety. It doesn’t feel particularly good. I constantly feel hamstrung because I’m missing one credit, or I don’t quite have enough knowledge to reach the next technology level that would unlock the thing I actually wanted to do.
So my main problem with Gaia Project is really just a skill issue.
The game also takes about four hours, so it’s not exactly something I’m eager to pull off the shelf on a Wednesday night when everyone has work the next morning. I’ve made similar criticisms of Terra Mystica and Age of Innovation. They’re all descendants of the same system. They share a lot of DNA, even though people who have played them extensively will rightfully tell you they’re all very different games and that those differences matter tremendously. I don’t doubt them. They’re just all built around a style of resource optimization that I consistently struggle with.
The question I’ve been asking myself after my most recent play is this: how many times am I willing to play a game I don’t particularly enjoy because someone else at the table absolutely loves it? I think the important context to answer that question is frequency. We probably play Gaia Project once a year, at best. Once a year I’m perfectly happy to sit down, play a game I know I’m not good at, and get absolutely curb-stomped because my friends genuinely enjoy pulling the levers and dancing with the system. I can absolutely see where people derive joy from Gaia Project. I really can. I’m just not one of those people. Maybe we’d play faster if we played it more often. Maybe I’d remember to build a resource engine first before rushing the top tier buildings if we played it twice in a row. But we’ll never know.
For me, Gaia Project ends up being a frustrating experience because I constantly feel handcuffed by my lack of resources. I’m constantly one credit short of a Happy Meal. There are literally hundreds of games I’d rather play. At the same time, I can’t ignore the incredible design achievement sitting in front of me. Balancing fourteen asymmetric factions while creating this kind of strategic depth and ridiculously high skill ceiling is remarkable.
It’s honestly amazing looking at the highest-rated players on Board Game Arena and seeing people with over sixteen hundred games played maintaining something like a ninety-one percent win rate. Then I watch expert playthroughs where players casually break two hundred points and it feels almost unreal. Watching them play is kind of like watching Bruce Lee smash concrete with his bare hands. Then I stand up, turn around, and immediately stub my toe on a brick wall.
I am not Bruce Lee. I will never be Bruce Lee.
But for all the Bruce Lees of the board gaming community, I’m genuinely glad Gaia Project exists.
