LogFAQs > #935330617

17. Concordia (2013)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Route-building, point-to-point movement, economic, hand-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-120 minutes (around 30 per player)
Experience: 9-12 plays (2017-2019), incl once with Salsa expansion
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 9/100 (2018)

Summary - On a map of the Roman Empire, each player spreads their colonists across the board to build houses in the cities and build the highest-scoring empire. On a player's turn, they play a card and perform its action. The cards abilities generally enable a player to move around the board/build cities, gain resources (and often allow neighboring players on the map to gain resources), trade resources for money or vice versa with the bank, buy more cards, or produce more dudes. The final score is determined by the cards in a player's hand/discard pile at the end of the game: each card is more valuable depending on the cities that a player has built.

Design - Solely based on its gameplay mechanics, Concordia is the most purely elegant game of its weight that I know. Like Century, Concordia is a pure hand-builder, where your entire turn is just playing a card. It's even purer than Century, in that your turn is always playing a card - acquiring cards, refreshing your hand, and spending your resources are not special actions; rather, they're all functions of specific cards as well.

Now, the actual decisions and actions printed on those cards are considerably more complex than simpler games, of course. You can chain together lots of smooth moves in Concordia, planning ahead a few turns as you angle for your goal, but unlike Century, you'll want to reassess your plan and try to manage the board state and your personal resources.

The elegance of the system means that despite its taxing decision-making, actually playing Concordia is super-smooth and relaxing. There are lots of small, quality-of-life benefits to Concordia. First, there is no round structure in the game where everyone stops to prep the board. Compared to peers like Power Grid, Spirit Island, Food Chain Magnate, and even Viticulture, this lack of bureaucracy keeps the game more relatively focused. That's not the say there isn't an ebb and flow that comes with that round structure, though - the way the Prefect action is replenished, the way the Tribune mechanic works, and the moving of the Prefectus Magnus card all give Concordia minor chapters within a game. But these are all player-driven instead of enforced by the game, which provides a smoother rhythm.

Probably the coolest part of Concordia is its actual gameplay positivity. Every action you take increases your economy, score, or both: even a Tribune action gives you coins and possibly adds a colonist - both coins and colonists are worth points. The Mercator always puts you 3-5 coin ahead and always improves your allocation of goods. The Senator and Architect, of course, allow you to grab the new cards and build the new cities that together comprise both your engine and your victory points.

And of course, there's the Prefect. While the Prefect is played only once every three turns or less, it's the single most constructive part of Concordia. Anyone who has played Settlers of Catan (or hell, Monopoly) will recognize how fun it is to receive benefits on someone else's turn. The way the Prefect causes resources to be distributed is straight outta Catan: in a given province, each city will produce its type of good, so everyone who's built in that city will receive the goods. The process of moving around routes to place cities, and using those cities to gain further resources on players' turns, should feel very familiar. What's missing compared to Catan is dice rolls and trading, both of which are very welcoming to me - player agency determines production, while there's no wasted time due to trading.

In terms of the actual game, Concordia is an efficency puzzle. That might not be the most exciting thing to everyone. The balance also tends to favor card-buys instead of house-builds to end the game in my experience, when house-builds are almost by definition more fun.

Experience - Concordia is one of those games that I knew was great from the get-go, even playing with a slow group. I tried it with a friend who brought it once, then requested it over and over at meetups. Gaming pal #1 gifted it to me a short time ago and I've been pleased to have it, even though it doesn't hit the table quite as often as I'd like - but then, that's almost all my non-party games.

Future - The one thing you could hold against Concordia legitimately is that it's a bit same-y. The only true variability in the game comes from minor variation in the order in which cards appear and some minor variation in the distribution of the citiea. Aside from Minerva cards, you can generally run a similar strategy each game. It also probably is better played with more than 2, to the detriment of my likeliest gaming group.

Nonetheless, I haven't even come close to playing out Concordia yet. It doesn't hit the highest highs, but it's one of the most consistently strong performers I know of. Eager to play again when I get the chance (and especially without having to reteach.)
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness