LogFAQs > #898345062

9. Concordia
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124361/concordia

Genre/mechanics: Resource management, area control, engine-building, card-drafting, action selection, hand management
Rules complexity: 8/10
Game length: 60-120 minutes
Player count: 2-5
Experience: 3 games with 3, 5 players
First played: 2017

Concordia is about trading goods in the ancient Mediterranean. You have colonists who sail and build settlements, which generate resources. The gameplay in Concordia is entirely card-driven - you have access to your entire deck of cards in your hand, and on your turn you simply play one to take the action. Some of the cards allow you to purchase other cards (added immediately to your hand). You do not need to play every card - resting as your action refreshes your hand. The cards are worth VP depending on your board state.

Enjoyment - It's kind of mind-blowing how much I enjoyed this dry, boring eurogame. Trading in the Mediterranean is almost a memetically generic theme in a eurogame. But after playing it, I had it on my mind non-stop for months. I deliberately sought it out at the game store to play because it's so dope.

Design - It's all about the elegance in Concordia. Like so many of well-designed games, your turn in Concordia is one action. It takes a bit to learn each card's power and perhaps the cost of each structure (and setup is something of a bear), but once you get that, it's intuitive as hell - one of the least fiddly eurogames of its weight. There are no rounds or phases, so there's literally zero "accounting" work.

The other aspect about playing Concordia that's so rewarding is that it's an extremely nice, constructive game. There's some area control to it, but it's not as vicious as Settlers of Catan, for example - if someone occupies the city you want, you can still build there, at a higher cost. One of the best ways to gain resources is the Prefect action, in which you choose a region and have all the cities their produce goods. Doing so grants you a bonus resource, and everyone there gets resources. No annoying dice like in Catan! Whoo!

Taking the Prefect action in one area technically denies another player from using the same Prefect action there to get the bonus resource... but it will be available again once someone takes the Restore action using a Prefect card - you reset the regions for Prefect, and you get paid coin for each region you've restored. Again, it's constructive interaction, and it feels good.

The scoring in Concordia is pretty great, too. This can be tough to explain to people, because it's opaque: each card is worth X victory points, where X represents your board state. For example, each "Mars" card gives you two points per colonist. So if you have three Mars cards in your deck and six colonists, then you'll get 18 points. Due to the multiplicative way this works, it's important both to build your board and to draft cards for VP (and their actions, of course).

Finally - and I love this - there's an incentive for ending the game. The player who reaches 15 cities, or drafts the final card from the marketplace, receives the Concordia Card, worth 7 VP. Each other player then gets one turn except for the game-ender. Pretty damn good incentive to rush a bit, or prepare yourself to make high-valued plays at game end.

Future - Highly considering buying Concordia. Now that I've played it three times the "itch" is scratched, but it's something I'd want to bring to the table frequently, and to have the power to do so.

Bonus question - What is your favorite "trading in the Mediterranean" themed eurogame? What game surprised you with how much you liked it, based on its genre?

Hint for #6 - a eurogame that's the opposite of Concordia in fiddliness and elegance, which got a second edition ten years after the first
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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