OUR REVIEW
COMMODITIES AND OFFICES
AUFBRUCH DER HÄNDLER
IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE
A great land mass, divided into hexagonal areas, easily recognizable as representing Europe. Forests, meadows, grain fields and mountains, some of them carrying numbers, supplemented by cards, wooden roads and small, sturdy wooden houses … What’s missing? Oh yes, two six-sided dice. This sounds rather suspiciously like Settlers of Catan. And, in fact, Klaus Teuber is presenting us with a new stand-alone game in the Catan family, called Aufbruch der Händer (AdH). The title is a description of the game!
Background:
Players take up the characters of powerful tradesmen/women, who try to set up a huge trade network in the dusk of the Middle Ages. They build offices, send out their traders to build more offices and thereby acquire new resources. They also build up trade routes to deliver their commodities to foreign cities. When you have sold all your commodities you are the greatest tradesman/woman of all and have won the game.
Components, set-up and start of the game:
The big Kosmos standard box offers up copious components of high quality: First of all a really roomy board, which compares in size to the area of “Great-Catan” (two core games plus extension for 5 and 6 players). This board is double-sided; the front side, marked by the white ship depicted in the Atlantic Ocean, shows the board for the standard game. The back side is marked with the tail fin of a whale and is intended for beginners or the short game.
The components are also marvelous and for four players; 30 trade routes, 12 offices, 2 trade vehicles and 2 traders for each player, plus 120 cards for resources and development, 40 commodity tiles, 68 coins and 15 number chips. To complete the list I need to mention two card holders and two dice, and, not to be overlooked, a robber in black.
In this review I will only talk about the standard game and leave the short game for you to discover. At the start the number tiles marked with dotted circles are distributed on the corresponding colored areas, the remaining number chips are shuffled face-down and stored on the Ocean area. For three players you place ten commodity tiles in the storage facilities, for four players you store eight of them, and place nine offices on them for three players, and 7 for four players, starting at the bottom; thus one commodity tile at the top of the row stays empty. Each player starts with three Gold. Then you determine the starting player as usual by rolling dice. Starting with him, each player sets one of three offices on one of the purple starting areas. And again, as usual, the last player places two offices and the game goes back counter-clockwise to the starting player. In AdH you now place a third office, again in clockwise order from the starting player to the last player who now places one of his trade routes next to one of his offices and places a trade vehicle next to it. Once again we repeat this counter-clockwise back to the starting-player. You must take care not to connect to another city with this one trade route.
The game
The game itself of course is similar to the core game of Settlers of Catan. By rolling the dice all players receive resources from the areas where their own offices are located. In case you roll a 7, nobody receives resources. This is known to all fans of Settlers very well. When someone has more than 7 cards in hand when the 7, representing the bandit, is rolled, he must discard half of them (rounded down). Evil, evil robber! The active player relocates the robber and can draw a card resources card from a player whose office is next to new robber location.
If you do not receive resources in a round (never in case of a 7), also due to the fact that the robber blocks the area, you are at least consoled with 1 gold. You can acquire resources by trading them with fellow players any way, also with gold, and with the bank at a rate of 3:1. Additionally, twice in your turn, you can buy any resource for 2 gold. Thus the game flows rather smoothly and also rather enjoyable because you can develop in every turn.
Trade routes can be built directly. If you thereby connect isolated cities (which are not yet connected to other cities), you receive 1 gold for each of your own trade routes. All other players also receive one Gold each for their own trade routes; of course the shortest route is valid for this. When a trade route is built to an area that is marked with two arrows you can instantly build another trade route directly next to first one (and only there!) for free!
Offices can only be set up by traders. You pay the cost for a trader (one Wood, Sheep and Grain each) and place him next to one of your own offices. Then you pay the price for moving this trader (one Grain for three steps). When the trader reaches a city where no office has been built yet, he must instantly build one. In the coastal cities you receive between one and three gold for this, as marked on the board. When one or more resources areas border this office that are not yet marked with numbers you take one in the corresponding color from the ocean store and place it on the area. When none is available in the correct color, you take any one of your choice that is already on the board and transfer it to the new area. You can only take or relocate one number chip, even when more than one resources area without a number chip borders your new office. This is the first crux in the strategy for this game: If I am the one who builds all his offices very quickly, I will have lots of resources in the middle of the board, but my fellow players will take away many of the number chips toward the end of the game. This poses the question if my stamina will be sufficient in the long run.
Building an office is free, by the way, but the trader who built it is put back into stock. This method acquires new resources for you. Another aspect that is no less important is that you free one more commodity tile by building an office. Because at the end the victory condition is simply to be the one who has delivered all his commodities to offices of other players.
Commodities take us directly to the trade vehicles! One of them is at your disposal on the board at the start of the game. Should you want to use the other one, too, you pay the costs (one Wood, Ore and Salt each) and place the vehicle next to one of your own trade route sections which is adjacent to one of your own offices. If you want to move the trade vehicle you pay one Salt to move the vehicle along three trade route sections. If the trade vehicle thereby reaches an opponent’s office you deliver one of your commodities there and place it underneath the office. This indicates that a commodity has been delivered and that nobody else can deliver a commodity to this office. Which shows us the next crux of the game: I must set up offices to free my commodities in order to deliver them. But this is only possible when my fellow players also build offices, of course rather near to my offices, or mine rather close to theirs!
I have to pay toll if my trade vehicles should travel along the trade routes of other players – a total of 1 Gold for using a trade route of another player by my vehicle for each round in which I use it. Should I want to move my second vehicle along external trade routes, too, I would have to pay another Gold for this second vehicle.
At long last there are the well-liked development cards available for purchase. These are relatively cheap compared to other features, as they only cost one Sheep and one Salt each. This will buy you one of the following four kinds of cards: Lanzenreiter (Lance Riders) who fend off the robber, give you two Gold in addition and let you draw one resource from a player involved; Geleitbrief (Letter of Consignment), which allows you to buy two trade route sections instantly; Bestechung (Bribery), you can move a trade vehicle immediately up to five trade routes without having to pay toll to other players, and, finally, Beziehungen (Connections), which you can use to move your trader along for up to 7 cross roads or take 3 gold from stock. As in the Settlers core game you can play only one development card in y turn and it cannot have been bought in this turn.
End of game and scoring
As already mentioned earlier, the game ends instantly when a player has delivered all ten commodity tiles (eight in a game for four players). This player wins and can have the title of “Greatest Trader of the Middle Ages” bestowed on him. The rules do not make provisions for additional placings; but if you like you can treat the ten commodity tiles as so many victory points and have other players score their number of delivered commodity tiles as victory points, too, to have a placing for all players. In case of a tie you can use the number of offices built as a tie-breaker or share the position.
Resume:
With Aufbruch der Händler Klaus Teuber has created another oeuvre in the seemingly endless procession of Catan settings. The line of success will probably not be interrupted with this game, either, as the next stand alone has been announced; it takes us to the stars with Star Trek Catan.
The rules are easily read and very clearly structured. The last pages of the rules are devoted to basic hints and tips of how to play and Klaus Teuber provides information on the historic roots of the game.
Unfortunately one of the main actors on the stage, a true companion since the beginnings of Catan, has been written out of the play; Loam/Brick hat to cede precedence to Salt.
Despite AdH yielding a lovely game, the light-handedness of the core game is not there, and in any case, it does not introduce new mechanisms. The similarity to the “Trails to Rails” game, published in 2010, cannot be overlooked, but Trails to Rails is not available in a German edition. The back side of the AdH board offers a short game, either if you do not have much time or as an introductory game for beginners.
The duration of the game is rather long with 120 minutes, and therefore the game probably appeals more to hard-core fans of Catan. But those will buy Catan anyway, for all others it is not absolutely necessary to buy the game.
Players: 2-4
Age: 12+
Time: 60.120
Designer: Klaus Teuber
Artist: Michael Menzel
Price: ca. 30 Euro
Publisher: Kosmos 2011
Web: www.kosmos.de
Genre: Resources management
Users: With friends
Version: de
Rules: de
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Few new mechanisms
Therefore mechanisms work very well
Based on Trails to Rails
Compares to:
All games in the Settlers of Catan range, especially to Trails to Rails
Other editions:
Currently none
My rating: 5
Christian Huber:
Another gift from Klaus Teuber – his newest creation in the seemingly boundless Catan universe.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 1
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 1
Communication (red): 2
Interaction (brown): 1
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0