Episode 191: Hallertau

Hallertau is a resource management and action selection title designed by Uwe Rosenberg, with art by Lukas Siegmon and Klemens Franz, and published in 2020 by Lookout Games. In Hallertau, players take on the role of managing a village in the famous hops-producing Hallertau region of Bavaria, growing crops, cultivating sheep, and supplying craftsmen with the necessary resources to improve their trades.

The game area is comprised of new main features: each players community building, fields, and stables, which among other things tracks their resources, rounds, action cards, and craft building advancement; and the main action board, where players will place workers to take actions. At the start of the game, the action board will be set up with four decks of cards: two of these decks, the market cards and point cards, are the same every game. The other two decks, the farmyard cards and gateway cards, will be selected from one of four “themed” decks. Each deck provides slightly different ways to manage and fuel your economy over the course of the game, and while for your first plays you’ll probably used the recommended starting decks, these can otherwise be mixed and matched for future plays.

At the start of every round, you’ll collect a number of workers and revealed in the window of your community building, which, over the course of the game and with good planning, will move down your player board revealing increasingly higher numbers of starting workers. This is followed by an income phase where any Market cards players played earlier in the game now trigger. Then, players will, in turn order, take actions by placing one or more workers on an action space. Action spaces will require the use of 1, 2, or 3 workers depending on whether or not players have used that space previously.

Action spaces provide a wide variety of benefits, but in general they will allow you to collect resources, plant crops, gain sheep, or collect cards from one of the four decks. A quick note about the four card decks: These cards are a central part of the game, and can be triggered at any time and in any order. Most require having either a certain game state (for example, having 5 sheep in your stable, or no fields in row 2, or similar states) or require the expenditure of some number of resources. Playing these cards will give you even more resources, income, points, or more cards – and generally more than one of these benefits at a time.

After all workers have been placed on actions, players will move into a harvest phase, a sheep phase, and finally get the chance to move their community building. Everything in Hallertau leads up to this, as to advance your community building – giving you more workers on future turns AND massive end-game scoring – you will need to spend your resources to advance each of the five craft buildings along your player board. Each building requires certain kinds and relationships of resources to advance (two buildings, for example, require you to spend more of one specific kind of resource than another to advance it), and the current game round will tell you how many total resources you need to play, with the total number of variety of requirements increasing as the game advances – from spending a single resource the first round, to up to 6 the final round to advance the building.

If every craft building advances one space, the community building will advance to follow. To be victorious in Hallertau is going to require enough planning and resource management to advance your craft buildings multiple times on the same turn. This glosses over some of the other features, resources, and actions in the game, but suffice it to say that managing all these elements in service of advancing your community building is what the game is all about.

The game continues for six rounds, at the end of which players total their points from sheep, resources, market and points cards, and their community building. The player with the most points, wins.

01:51:01 – Review

02:12:52 – Ratings

02:23:51 – And Now a Word from our Sponsor: AEG

ReRoll

02:25:31 – Oceans – North Star Games; Designer: Nick Bentley, Dominic Crapuchettes, Ben Goldman, Brian O’Neill; Art: Guillaume Ducos, Catherine Hamilton;

Check out our original review for Oceans during Episode 166.

Gameplay Photos

* Disclosure: These titles were received free of charge by the publishers or distributors. If you are interested in submitting a title for review, please read our Review Policy.

Show Notes

Banter

Plays

News

REVIEW: Hallertau

ReRoll

Gameplay Photos

Episode 303: Tag Team

Episode 302: Shackleton Base

Major Announcement