Disclaimer: A copy of Pioneers in Peril was provided by the designer for review
I don’t normally begin reviews by talking about the production, but in the case of Pioneers in Peril, the production is the star of the show. A fully wooden, hand made game by designer Matt Terry in his solar and wind powered garage. This game isn’t just another product, it’s obviously a passion project, marrying a love of board games, wood working, and western story telling.
Pioneers in Peril stands out on your shelf because of it’s all wood production. When you lift the lid and start riffling through the hundreds of wooden chits, you’ll smell the cut wood, you’ll feel a splinter here and there, and you’ll see the imperfections that make every copy of this game unique. A whole big game made my one guy in his garage is the kind of artistry that I want to see more of in the board game scene, and I applaud Matt Terry in taking this approach. Instead of shipping files off to China for a quick print, he’s built himself a tiny production facility and his labour of love truly shines through. And this has to be a labour of love, because there are a lot of wooden pieces in the box, all laser cut and assembled by hand. It’s rustic and handmade, it feels purpose built rather than cheaply produced.
I’ll be the first to say that I don’t want every single one of my games to get this all wood treatment, but for Pioneers in Peril, it fits the theme. The handmade wooden aesthetic fits the old west pioneer setting so very well. The game starts with the centre tile, showing the bank, store, blacksmith, school, church, and saloon, and nothing more. Beyond the edges of town is wilderness, yet to be explored. On your turn, should you choose to, you’ll press yourself against the boundaries of the map and reveal what lies beyond.
A 4x game at its heart, Pioneers in Peril wants you to Explore, Expand, exploit and exterminate. Moving has you rolling a D6 (and doubling the number if you have a horse), then exploring has you revealing tiles as you walk your pieces into empty space. Forests, mountains, pastures, fields, rivers, deserts, all these land types also represent a resource that can be extracted and exploited. You’ll stake a claim, build buildings, and then you’ll need to defend your buildings from your competitors. You’ve staked this land, so you need to defend it from interlopers.
Also there’s a bandit that needs shooting every now and then, lest he causes havoc, but I’ll touch on him later.
One of the first things that struck me about Pioneers in Peril is just how much stuff there is. Both in the box and in the game. On your turn, each of your pioneers can do 2 actions, and there are, and I kid you not, 16 actions in this game. Most are fairly simple, like praying where pay $2 and draw a card (unless you have less than $5, then praying is free). And that rule example of “Do a thing, except for in this circumstance”, is fairly indicative of the entire rulebook. There are different win conditions and consequences for shootouts, depending on the participants. Player vs. Player, Player vs. Bandit, Sheriff vs. player, and Sheriff vs. Bandit, all of these scenarios exist, and requires the person holding the rulebook to remember what to do in each of those scenarios.
What I’m getting at here is that this game, production and rules both, are not Svelte, elegant productions. They don’t achieve a great deal with minimal components or rules overhead. Instead, they’re bulky, cumbersome at times, but if this is the kind of game you have a craving for, it’ll satisfy that craving like few other games will.
A game of Pioneers in Peril ends when someone achieves 20 points, and you earn points by having pioneers, buildings, homesteads, and diplomas. Each round you activate your workers and explore the land, adding hex tiles to the board. The hex tiles can be useful, developable land, like mountains, forests, and pastures, each land type will support a specific industry. But it can also be unforgiving and tough terrain, such as Deserts and Canyons. Should you so desire, as an action, you can pay some cash to stake a claim on a tile. Then in a future action, you can pay some more cash to build a building on that tile. If you happen to build a Ranch, Farm, Mine, or Sawmill, you’ll roll a dice and place that many resources onto that building. As yet another future action, you can choose to process that resource, provided you own the corresponding tool, like an ax for processing timber from a sawmill or a pickaxe for pulling coal from a mine.
In case you were wondering, if someone develops a coal mine and then wanders off, yes, you can sneak in behind them and pull coal from their building. Doing so is likely to get you shot, however.
So all these actions serve to earn you resources, which you can then use to sell or trade with. Because at the end of the day, all the things that earn you points cost money. Expanding your homestead costs a lot of money, but doing so allows you to have more pioneers in Peril. Of course that means you have more mouths to feed, and failing to feed those mouths will result in your pioneers perishing. Cash also works for tuition, earning your pioneers a diploma, giving you a special ability for the rest of the game. Again, 20 point of buildings, pioneers, and diplomas is how you win the game.
The last thing the players do on their turn is move the bandit. He starts off the board, but slowly crawls down a track before entering Peril. The bandit has a bunch of rules dictating where he wants to go (largely the saloon to buy a drink), but he can and will hold players up. Players can choose to have a shootout, or just succumb to the holdup, in which they roll the dice and lose that amount of money from their supply to the bandit.
At this point, I’ve mentioned the shootout a couple of times, so lets dig into that. Unlike the rest of Pioneers in Peril, which is a economic game about buying and selling goods to build a wild west empire, the shootout is more reminiscent of Dutch Blitz. Both players take their decks, ante up the number of bullets they want to spend on this encounter, then SPRAY AND PRAY BABY!!!!
*ahem*, I mean, both players count down, Three, Two, One, Draw! then both players flip over cards one at a time as fast as they can until one player pulls a HIT card and that player shouts HIT. The attacker deck has a single hit card out of the 10 in the deck while the defender has 2 hit cards. You only get to flip as many cards as bullets you put up for ante, and if you chose to put up less than 10 bullets, well, you might just never hit anything.
This shootout mechanic is quite a change of pace from the rest of the game, it’s fast and frenetic. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t beat a little faster when I stared into the eyes of my enemy, wondering which one of us was going to walk away from this encounter alive. The player who looses the shootout, loses their pioneer, and the winner has the chance to loot the body, adding insult to injury.
Pioneers in Peril is an interesting game. It’s economic focus on building and accruing wealth, and using that wealth efficiently to earn the points required to win make it feel like a euro game. But the randomness from the 6 sided die and the shootout mechanics keep one boot firmly planted into the amerithrash zone (although that’s not a term I’ve used for a long time). I think players who really prefer economic games will feel frustrated by this experience in more than one turn. The events can bestow random blessings and just as quickly take them away each round, the D6 might mean the mine you spent so much time and effort building only spits out a single nugget of coal. Sometimes life is unfair, and Pioneers in Peril leans into that cosmic irony.
In fact, Pioneers in Peril leans into a lot of that difficult homesteader lifestyle. From the production, to the aesthetic, to the boons and banes doled out seemingly at random. It captures that feeling that life and the world is always against you. You constantly need to worry about your food supplies, if your industries are producing, and worry if some ne’er-do-well is going to try to steal what you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Maybe you’ll be that person, because you desperately need just a little more food to feed your growing family, and someone left their field unattended. Maybe you’re just 2 dollars short of your next milestone, and a shootout is the fastest way to get that cash. Maybe you’ll do it, just because its fun to be an agent of chaos and your opponent is only one turn away from winning the game.
Pioneers in Peril is a rules dense game, but the rules almost always make sense thematically, making it a bit easier to digest. The whole game feels like the theme was in mind from the first moments of conception, rather than a window dressing pasted on after the fact. Maybe it’s the fresh cut wood smell in my nose, but playing this game certainly made me feel like we were toiling away in the western frontiers.
It’s a very sandbox-y game, one where you aren’t going to follow a scripted opening every time you play. Pioneers in Peril isn’t going to end in 90 minutes, every time you play. The game will ebb and flow as players expand and constrict. Having more stuff means more points, but it also means having more stuff to protect. I can’t deny the feel-bad moments when someone is making progress on their goals, only for the rug to be pulled out from under them by a devastating event or a shootout gone wrong. There are rules where players can lower the point threshold for victory, and even rules for players to leave and/or join mid game and what to do with all of that players stuff. Players can be eliminated from the Wild West. I think a lot of players will chafe at that idea, but I also think Pioneers in Peril is doing something a little special here.
In an era of companies off-shoring productions to cheaper regions, and AI slop showcasing the lazy producers urge to do things the cheapest, easiest way possible, I can’t help but admire Matt Terry and Deadwood Games. This is a game he built himself in his garage. This isn’t just another SKU to have on store shelves, but it’s a labour of love. And I think some of the rules sprawl I mentioned earlier is indicative of this; this is a game that he loves. It hasn’t been honed down to a fine edge, developed away all the potential pain points with blind play testers, and turned the game into a bland, samey experience. While the take-that aspects and potential to lose some of what I built are not things that I enjoy in my games, I feel like this game is exactly what Matt loves, and I can’t help by applaud his ambition as he toiled away in his garage, making the game of his dreams. I admire and cheer on this intensely independent creation, and encourage you to do the same.
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.
