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In The Speicherstadt by Stefan Feld, you are an importer in the Speicherstadt (warehouse district) in Hamburg, buying ship-lots of goods to try and fulfill specific contracts for victory points. You can also sell, trade, save goods and also hire firemen to protect your warehouses. Most of this is done by acquiring cards. Each round a number of cards are available and the players bid for the cards. Nothing unusual as Euro games go.
But the point of difference with The Speicherstadt (apart from its name) is the bidding mechanism. This is an interesting (and often frustrating) hybrid of "worker placement" and auction. Each player has 3 meeples and over 3 rounds place these above the cards they wish to bid on. The first meeple placed above a card gives its owner first "dibs" on the card, the second and subsequent meeples give their owners second and third "dibs" etc. After all the meeples are placed then the cards are evaluated left to right. The player owning the first meeple above a card decides whether to buy the card at a price equal to the total number of meeples above it or remove his/her meeple (hence dropping the price) and letting the owner of the next meeple decide whether to buy or not.
People use the cards they buy to fullfill contracts etc. If someone ends up not buying a card they get a consolation coin. There isn't much money in the game. Knowledge of the distribution of cards is very important. There are only limited numbers of each type of card and the deck is built up of 4 sub-decks (called seasons) each with their own characteristic (e.g. ships are rare at the beginning of the game and common at the end)
There are elements here of "worker placement" as players claim dibs on cards, bidding the price up as players stack their meeples above a popular card and dutch auction as players remove their meeples dropping the price for remaining players. This bidding mechanic is both clever and frustrating. Being first player gives you full choice of "first dibs" spots but little control over prices. Being last give you the opposite situation.
This game seems to be a straight forward and slightly boring do-stuff-to-get-points game driven by a very clever bidding mechanic. I would like to see this bidding mechanism used in an otherwise more interesting game. If you like trading games there are the nastier games like Before The Wind and Die Händler, or more negotiation oriented games like Settlers of Catan and Bohnanza.
(Played on 10 November 2010)
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