June 2, 2026

Hansa Teutonica Beginner’s Guide: Your First Game

Start with the base board, place your first traders, and complete a route. This walkthrough covers your first turns and the mistakes to watch for along the way.

What Is Hansa Teutonica?

Hansa Teutonica is a strategy board game by Andreas Steding, set in the medieval trading world of the Hanseatic League. You play as a merchant guild expanding your network of trading posts across northern Europe, competing with 1–4 other players for control of lucrative routes, powerful cities, and scarce upgrade opportunities.

The game is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of the Euro-style board game: elegant rules, meaningful decisions on every turn, and a satisfying tension between your own plans and everyone else's. It plays in about 60–90 minutes and rewards both careful long-term strategy and opportunistic play.

Hansa Teutonica Online is the officially licensed free digital version — you can play a solo game right now, no account required.

Set Up Your First Game

Start with the base Hanseatic League board, without optional modules. In the free solo game, you play against bots and the game handles setup for you. You do not need an account.

Before moving, find your personal supply, the general stock, and your player board. Pieces in your personal supply are ready to place; pieces in the general stock must first be hired with an Income action. You begin with two actions per turn.

For a physical game’s exact component counts and starting supplies, use the setup reference. The example below uses the base three-player map.

The Board: Routes, Cities, and Offices

The map shows a network of German cities connected by routes. Each route has a series of connection points — small spaces where you place your tradesmen (traders are wooden cubes; merchants are wooden discs).

The Hansa Teutonica base game board

The base game board, showing cities, routes, and connection points

When you fill all the connection points on a route, you can create a trade route — this is a separate action you take explicitly. When you do, your tradesmen are removed from those points and you place one trading post in a city at either end of the route.

Cities have colour-coded office slots — white, orange, pink, and black — where trading posts go. Your Privilege ability determines which colour spaces you can occupy: everyone starts at white (the lowest), and must develop Privilege to claim orange, pink, or black offices. The colour is what matters, not a point value on the slot itself.

Key concept: displacement You don't have to place on empty connection points. You can displace an opponent's tradesman — but the cost depends on what you're displacing: removing a trader (cube) costs you 1 extra tradesman to the general stock; removing a merchant (disc) costs 2 extra. Your opponent also gets to place the displaced piece plus bonus pieces from the stock on adjacent routes. It's a powerful but costly move.

On Your Turn

Each turn you take a number of actions (2 by default, up to 5 if you've developed your Actions ability). The five actions available are:

Actions can be taken in any order and repeated. You must finish one action fully before starting another.

Your First Two Turns: A Worked Example

Find the two-space route between Duisburg and Dortmund on the base three-player board. Assume both connection points and Duisburg’s trading post are empty, you have at least two traders in your personal supply, and there is no bonus marker on the route.

  1. First turn, action 1: place one trader from your personal supply on either connection point.
  2. First turn, action 2: place a second trader on the other point. The route is full, but you have not created it yet. Your turn ends.
  3. Next turn, action 1: if both pieces are still yours, take Create a Trade Route. Check city control, then place one of the route’s traders in Duisburg’s empty white square trading post. The other returns to the general stock.
  4. Next turn, action 2: use your remaining action to start another route or take Income if you need more pieces.

Opponents can interfere between your turns, so check the position again before creating the route. The point of this exercise is to learn the sequence: place, place, then spend a separate action to create.

Try your first route against bots — free, no account needed.

The Five Abilities

Each player has a personal writing desk (player board) that tracks five abilities. Developing an ability costs tradesmen from the board and reveals the next value on the track, which is not always higher. These are what separate a mediocre player from a great one.

Actions
How many actions you take per turn: 2 · 3 · 3 · 4 · 4 · 5. The most immediately powerful ability to develop.
Privilege
Which colour office spaces you can occupy: White → Orange → Pink → Black. You must develop this to claim higher-colour trading posts.
City Keys
At end game, each post in your largest network scores points equal to your City Keys value: 1 · 2 · 2 · 3 · 4. A big network multiplied by a high City Keys value is how games are won.
Book of Knowledge
How many of your own tradesmen you can move with Action D: 2 · 3 · 4 · 5. Developed using merchants (discs), not traders.
Bank
How many tradesmen you can hire from the general stock with Action A: 3 · 5 · 7 · all. Higher Bank means fewer income actions needed to stay stocked.

When you create a route beside a city with an ability pictogram (Groningen, Stade, Lübeck, Göttingen, or Halle), you can develop that ability instead of establishing a trading post. Remove the leftmost covered piece from that ability track into your personal supply.

The five ability tracks on a player's writing desk

Each player's writing desk tracks their five ability levels

How Scoring Works

Points (called prestige points) accumulate live during the game and are tallied finally at the end.

The game ends immediately in three ways. On the base board, a player reaches 20 track points, the tenth city fills, or a required replacement bonus marker is unavailable. Finish the triggering action, then score the game; there is no final round. Pay attention to all three — skilled players engineer the end when it benefits their score.

Common Beginner Mistakes

Once you are comfortable taking turns, the illustrated Hansa Teutonica strategy guide explains opening upgrades, displacement, network building, and end-game timing.

Ready to Play?

The best way to learn Hansa Teutonica is to play it. A solo game against bots lets you practise the mechanics at your own pace. You don't need an account — just click and play.

For a deeper reference — rules for every city bonus, all the board variants, the scoring system in full detail — see the full rules guide.

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