The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.
Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.
In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.
The Speicherstadt: What Is It?
When I think of the game catalog of designer Stefan Feld—well documented on our site via my colleague David McMillan and his “Focused on Feld” series—I think of all the following things:
- Dice
- “Point salad” scoring
- Mancala mechanisms
- Worker placement
- City building games
So, you can imagine my shock when John broke out the box for The Speicherstadt and then began the game overview:
“The Speicherstadt is one of my ‘grail’ games. It’s a Stefan Feld game, with no dice, very tight money mechanics, very low scores, and an auction system in a setting where the city of Hamburg is on fire and we’ll need to manage that with firemen cards.”
I lost my mind. A Stefan Feld game, with no dice? A Stefan Feld game, where scores are not only low, but sometimes in the negatives during play? A Stefan Feld game where a city is on fire?
The kicker: a Stefan Feld AUCTION game???
All of those things were shocking, and here’s what was more shocking: I loved The Speicherstadt. I had never heard of this game (later rethemed as Jórvík, which David reviewed a few years ago), but as I began the draft for this article, I went right out to eBay and BGG Marketplace to see if I could find a copy.
What makes The Speicherstadt so interesting is twofold…but first, a brief intro. The Speicherstadt is a 3-5 player auction game, where players spend each round using bidding markers in their player color to bid on cards in a marketplace scaled up or down based on player count. On a turn, a player must place one of their markers in a queue next to a card they would like to purchase. Once all markers are placed, cards are resolved from left to right.
The person who owns the bidding marker at the front of a queue has to decide whether to buy the card in that column, or not. The cost of the card is one coin, plus one coin for each bidding marker behind the active marker (this includes markers in both the active player’s color, as well as any opponent markers). If the active player passes, the next marker in line becomes the active player.
All cards are resolved like this, then new cards are placed. The cards? They are a mix of goods, contracts, powers, and set collection elements. In some ways, The Speicherstadt reminded me of how the mix of cards looks in Saint Petersburg. If you see a card you want, you’ll want to grab it now, in part because of the very limited pool of cards and overall rounds in The Speicherstadt. (Some of the cards are firemen, and when fire event cards enter the market, the player with the most fire protection gains points. The player with the lowest amount of fire protection loses points.)
That provided tension in every round. And you know The Speicherstadt is dusty because the game is so short; our three-player game took about 40 minutes, which included a teach. Scores ranged in the mid-20s to mid-30s, with a score track on the board that only reaches 39. (Not 40, not 50; 39!)
An Instant Classic
The Speicherstadt features only one challenging issue: pronouncing the title. Everything else here is magic, and instantly rose to the top of my favorite auction games, which includes titles such as Stockpile: Epic Edition, Ra, and The Princes of Florence. Money here is thistight, so having just a coin or two each round became the new normal after the initial setup. Players always want all the cards, because everything has a purpose. Some cards are in very short supply, like a warehouse card that extends storage capacity, or a set of four cards that become exceptionally valuable if a player can manage to win the auctions for those cards during play.
But The Speicherstadt is a winner because we found ourselves cursing the sky before every single card purchase. Placing even one meeple onto a bid track becomes a game of chicken: does Beth really want that card, or is she just trying to bait one of us into going there instead? I don’t want John to get that Bank card too easily…so I’ll add one of my bidding markers to the back of the line to increase the cost when he has to make that decision!
For such a short game, The Speicherstadt has a lot of meat on the bone. We played it at three players, but I already want to try it at the full player count of five to see what changes. While I never look to add expansion content with a game I have only tried once, I can see how dedicated players might want to add the expansion content for The Speicherstadt, the brilliantly named Kaispeicher. (As David notes in his review of Jórvík, it will be much easier to find Jórvík than an old copy of both The Speicherstadt and Kaispeicher.)
The setup, teach, playtime and teardown are so easy that this fits in that very handsome middle zone of long filler or short strategy game.
Oh, The Speicherstadt is a dandy! I’m already looking forward to my next play.
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