Concordia Board Game First Impressions

Concordia has Point to Point Movement, Goods Trading and a Dull Theme.

I should hate this game, but I really really didn’t.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman Empire ruled the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. With peace at the borders, harmony inside the provinces, uniform law, and a common currency, the economy thrived and gave rise to mighty Roman dynasties as they expanded throughout the numerous cities. Guide one of these dynasties and send colonists to the remote realms of the Empire; develop your trade network; and appease the ancient gods for their favour — all to gain the chance to emerge victorious!

Concordia is basically a card game where you play a card and take the action on it. Everyone starts with the same cards in their hand, once played those cards are not played again. This is until you play your Tribune card which brings your discard pile back to your hand.

The cards are also your end game scoring with different types of cards giving you points for various things you do in the game.

With these cards you’ll be gaining resources, to do things to get points which is pretty standard. But the card play makes it work better than in any other game I’ve played before.

The Cards

The Architect card lets you move guys down routes and build buildings on those routes. I generally dislike movement points on a point-to-point movement system but this one was OK. The more units you have the more points of movement you get so that alone encourages you to spend some resources making new people and boats. To build you have to use brick, plus a resource of the area you’re building on, plus money, plus money for each other player who has already built there. The building is TOUGH, especially late game but it never felt impossible, just right I think.

These buildings help you when you or your opponent plays a Prefect card. This ‘activates’ a region and everyone who has a building in that region gains a resource of that type. Also, if you played the Prefect card you can flip over the tile for that region to gain the most valuable resource in that area. Flipping over the tile shows you an amount of money and when you play the Prefect you can instead take all the money and flip all of the tiles back to the resource side.

The Mercator lets you buy/sell goods and selling goods is good as it not only gets you money but also helps empty out your warehouse which only has 12 storage spaces in it

You can use the Senator card to buy more cards. These go straight into your hand and are similar but usually better than those you already have.

The Diplomat lets you copy the top card of anyone’s discard pile.

As I mentioned earlier the Tribune card lets you bring your cards back into your hand. You also get a bit of money and the chance to build a new unit.

Concordia Game End

Once all the cards have been bought or someone places all their houses the last round is triggered.

Points come from the cards so you can multiply your scoring quite easily if you have a plan. I did OK managing to have a building on every valuable cloth space. This not only gave me most of my end-game points but also gave me a solid income.

Concordia Summary

Turns are quick… Play a card, do the card, done. Of course, we had that one player whose turn took longer than everyone else’s put together and yes, of course, he won making any slow play argument invalid… But not even that could spoil this experience, thank you for WiFi access and the Sky Sports app.

Concordia is a very good game, one I will look to get a copy of once I have played it again to make sure this time wasn’t a fluke 😉

Jesta ThaRogue