Hansa Teutonica

Hansa Teutonica has that dry, old-fashioned look which suggests a machine beneath the board rather than a story. There is one: a worker-placement and engine-building design with very little downtime, and systems that mesh with impressive precision.

Players place their people around the network and steadily improve their own efficiency, each upgrade opening the door to the next. The pace is brisk, the choices feed one another, and the game rarely leaves anyone merely waiting for a turn.

The real contact comes through displacement: you push pieces out, make room for yourself, and force other players to reconsider their positions. A neat idea, until the two players in front decide to keep displacing each other; then their lead expands in a way the rest of the table can struggle to check.

The opening also felt rather scripted to me, as though the game had already decided which first moves it wished to see. Britannia appears to offer more openings, but on the base map the elegant machine has a distinctly awkward hole in its balance. Hansa Teutonica is tight and quick, but for me it makes it far too easy to see how you are going to be left behind.