More about Hamburg
What makes 🕍 Hamburg (or Bruges) fun? Let’s check under the hood.
Like with many Stefan Feld games, dice 🎲 play a major role here. Different colored dice are rolled each round and give the values for some of the actions. This input randomness provides a lot of fun decisions. 🙃
The other notable feature of the game are the multi-use cards 🃏 - there are SIX ‼️ ways you can use a card!
🧐 The main thing is constructing them as buildings so you get their ability and VP. Tableau-building with these will allow you to form a strategy. You need building sites as face-down cards to construct these. You could also use a card to take workers, money, build walls or decrease your threat tracks - these all depend on the color of the card used. Threats are increased each time dice rolls are 5 or 6. These are quite brutal negative effects that you will want to fend off.
The biggest quality of life improvement over Bruges is that you have 5 decks for the 5 card colors. So when picking cards at the start of the round you can get exactly what you want. 😉 In Bruges you only saw the color of the topmost card, but could never be sure what’s underneath. Hamburg gets rid of this unfair randomness.
Another new feature of the core game I like are the new black die and the clerics. Depending on the value of the black die, clerics are placed in the church. Their positions will make certain card types worth more points. You can use the cleric tiles module which modifies a standard action each round based on the clerics position - in either a positive or negative way.
Optionally you can use the Mayor module to introduce asymmetric player powers.
If you want even more spice (randomness), there are a few smaller modules to include, but those do not fit the character limit anymore 😅 The ships and pets from the expansions of Bruges are also included here.
☝️The biggest decision each turn is what color cards to draw - but your plan could change so much depending on what’s on the cards and what value the rolled dice have.
I have mixed feelings 😐 about Hamburg mostly due to the poor KS campaign, but the game is great and I am sorry it didn’t get the visual remake it deserves.
