The Speicherstadt

About this board game

The Speicherstadt is an auction card game for 2–5 players that plays in around 45 minutes. Set in Hamburg around 1900, it places you among the wholesalers of Speicherstadt, a storehouse complex handling spices, coffee, tea, carpets, and other goods from around the world.

The game’s central mechanism is a distinctive auction system. Players place meeples above available cards, creating towers. Each meeple in a tower raises the card’s cost, but only for the players positioned below it, making the timing of every bid important.

Each player can make only three bids during a round. You must decide when to claim a card for yourself and when to place a meeple in order to make another player pay more. The cards you acquire can provide resources, contracts, and special scoring opportunities.

• Contracts: collect the required sets of resources to earn victory points.
• Special cards: benefit from features such as counting offices and the port, which rewards collected ship cards.
• Firemen cards: avoid negative points by preparing for sudden fires.
• Seasonal progression: winter, spring, summer, and autumn introduce increasingly powerful cards.

Resources must be managed carefully as the year advances. Stronger cards appear in later seasons, so an appealing purchase now may need to be weighed against future opportunities and limited bidding options.

Fire protection is especially important in The Speicherstadt. Players who ignore firemen cards can suffer negative points, turning security into a crucial part of the race for victory. The result is a compact auction game about timing, rising costs, profitable deals, and planning ahead.