The components in Concordia are nice and of good quality. The game board is large and double-sided, with high-quality artwork. There is a side for 2-4 players and a side for 3-5 players. The Italia side is the shorter gameplay of the two. The board itself is full of colour and finely detailed artwork. There are many locations on the board allowing for many opportunities to build and gain resources.

And don’t worry, I’m going to be going on and on about these delightful mechanisms. But first, the conceit. Like I said before, Concordia is very much in the infamous “trading in the Mediterranean” sub-genre, though that’s never bothered me as it does some. You’re going to start at Rome and expand your trading network by sending ships and people across the land. At cities you can build buildings which give you access to the goods there (of which there are 5 kinds). Acquiring goods and expanding your trading network is really the entire point. When you use the prefect action, you choose a province (out of 12 on the main game board), and get the resource shown, plus all of the cities in that province produce resources for the people who have buildings there. Like with Dominant Species, another brilliant area control game, it’s beneficial to completely dominate a province early to maximize how many resources you get there, but there’s also the potential for a strategy where you poke your nose into as many provinces as you can to turn other people’s prefect actions into passive income. I sort of wish there was more of a distinction in those two strategies, though, because even in a 3 player game on the big map, we were all up in each other’s geographical business during the latter third of the game. Similar to Power Grid, you can build where someone else has built, but it becomes more expensive as more people build there. Like many people, I first heard about Concordia when Shut up and Sit Down gave it a glowing review. However, by that point I’d found that my gaming tastes had drifted away from them, and I was less likely to buy into any hype they were serving. Sure, it was a Euro game, and they made it sound like a fantastic time. But even though these were the folks who still spoke fondly of crunchy Euro mainstays like Terra Mystica, I found myself suspecting that Concordia was probably a too-light, too-social experience for my keen analytical mind. I’ve gone in quite early with a couple of negatives because after only a few plays, Concordia: Solitaria may already be one of my favourite solo and cooperative experiences. Mary, Mary Quite Contrar…ius. You will have to pay their cost to place a house on the desired city, if someone already has a house on the space you will have to pay extra. As you only have one of each card in your starting hand, everyone will start doing different actions. Some might try to gain resources by using the Perfect card, which allows you to turn over any province tile that shows one of the goods and not coins to gain the goods, if any player has any houses in that province they will also gain the goods that are on their houses tile.Every single card will give you points some way or another, so the pure quantity of cards that you collect matters. But the points you get per card are dependent on what you do on the game board. Both of those things cost valuable resources. How do you spend your resources to maximize points? Do you try to collect a bunch of cards? Do you shoot for only a couple of scoring categories and try to maximize them? Do you build up a giant empire on the board and only try to grab additional cards at the end? My guess is, after one play, at least, that there are a few general strategies that may work, although I can’t be confident about that at all at this point. For each province with at least one of their houses the player receives 1 VP. (Imperium max. 12 VP, Italia max. 11 VP) Mercurius

Concordia is a 2-6 player hand management game which, as of this writing, sits in the BGG top 25 games of all time. Although I am categorizing this article as a review, most, if not all, seasoned tabletop hobbyists have known about Concordia for a long time. Second, this is a point salad game, which means there are some inherent issues that arise from that. Fundamentally, there’s a point floor, so while final scores in our three player game centered around 120-130 the real battle is over maybe ⅓ of those points. The rest are given through the natural course of playing the game. This creates a disconnect between playing good moves and understanding exactly how good those moves are. A little tidbit: the basic resources gained from the prefect action are pseudo-randomized, and they’re skewed towards the more valuable resources like cloth. This allows players to get expensive resources early, which not only allows them to invest those resources into getting more of that resource later on in the game, but it provides a bit of a tempo boost to help everyone get their engines going. Without that small bit of influence over the random setup the game would drag a lot in the beginning. I get the feeling I’m going to be saying this a lot in the review, but that’s good game design. You have three meeples and three meeple ships that you can control. They come in five different colours and are all highly finished.Concordia is a game with rules that are easy to learn, but mastering it can take a lifetime! With additional maps and expansions along the way (all the official ones, in fact), the replayability of Concordia: Digital Edition is near infinite. Play against the AI or challenge your friends in the hot seat mode or online cross-platform multiplayer on PC, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. The authentic feel of the board game, along with the intuitive UI makes it the perfect addition to your gaming collection! 🏺 What can you expect? Players take on the role of leaders in the Roman dynasty who are tasked with growing their empire, settling in new regions, trading goods, and acquiring new cards to score the most victory points. Over the course of a series of rounds, players manage a hand that begins with seven cards and will slowly grow over the course of play. All of the game’s scoring is tied to these cards—in that way, Concordia so elegantly dictates each turn with its card action choices and its end game with those same cards. plus the goods depicted beneath the card's position on the game board, where a question mark stands for a good of the player's choice. The personality cards are the driving force behind gameplay. Each player starts with an identical set of seven. Once a card is played, it remains in front of the player. Cards cannot be reclaimed (and played again), until the player uses a specific card to reclaim all of their cards. Actions available include moving colonists, gaining new colonists, establishing trade houses, purchasing personality cards, producing goods, and trading. Managing your plays At its height, the Roman Empire extended from Britannia, to Egypt and Babylonia, and encompassed the Mediterranean Sea. With uniform law, and a common currency established throughout the provinces, the economy boomed. From this foundation, savvy merchants could thrive and establish their own empires (of sorts), built on the trade of commodities. This is the setting for Concordia, a two – five player, mid-weight, strategy game of economic development.

Can I afford to wait to build that next trading house, knowing that the sestertii cost will multiply by the number of other houses already there? How can I afford not to do it, if my neighbor uses their Prefect card to trigger a production in that same region, where they already have a couple other trading houses? Again this is a fine line that has to be walked in any game of this type, and I can’t be certain how well Concordia has done it at this point. My head says that this is exactly the kind of game that can probably be figured out with a moderate amount of play, and that avoiding that fate is so difficult to design. My heart says that I should trust my first impression and just declare it a masterpiece. You start off by choosing one of your cards and playing it, then carrying out that action. So far, so Concordia, right? However, in the solo and co-op modes, the card also tells you what Contrarius’ response will be. If you play your Architect card, they’ll help himself to one of the personality cards from the board. If you play your Mercator card, they’ll build a house, and that province will produce. You’re playing the game already knowing your opponent’s move, so that makes the game easy, right? Firstly, you choose your difficulty level: standard, veteran or expert. I’ll be honest, the first solo game I played on standard level I lost by quite some distance. I don’t mind that though, because it was a really good way of getting a feel for the game. The next time I played I… well, I still lost quite heavily. I am at peace with being just really bad at games. You’ve Got To Know When To Hold ‘Em Concordia is a great worker placement game. You have to move your colonists around the map by land and sea building houses and acquire goods that will assist you in buying more cards giving you more potential victory points at the end. Concordia was designed by Mac Gerdts and produced by PD Verlag. ComponentsEach action card’s scoring condition is clearly listed at the bottom. Some score for end-game leftover cash (admittedly, I’ve never seen someone lean into this strategy and win). Other cards score for the number of regions where a player has presence on the map. Some reward a specialist—if someone has focused on building trading houses in wine or cloth regions, that could lead to a big payday during final scoring. One side of the game board shows the entire Roman Empire with 30 cities for 3-5 players, while the other shows Roman Italy with 25 cities for 2-4 players.) When all cards have been sold, the game ends. The player with the most VPs from the gods (Jupiter, Saturnus, Mercurius, Minerva, Vesta, etc.) wins the game. a) The player chooses a province where the houses produce goods. He can only choose an active province whose bonus marker (province tile) still shows the goods symbol. It is not necessary that the player (or any other player) owns a house in the chosen province. He flips the bonus marker of the province to its coin side and receives 1 unit of the goods type depicted on the bonus marker out of the bank. In addition all houses inside the province, regardless of their owner, each produce one unit of the goods produced in that city. Concordia: Digital Edition is a faithful adaptation of a strategic board game ranked in Top 20 board games of all time. Plan ahead and make crucial decisions every turn. Always be prepared to make a trade off - your actions can very well benefit other players as well as yourself.

Action of the Colonist card (second part): The rulebook says to take two Sestertii for every colonist you have on the board (as an alternative to building new colonists), the card itself says to take five Sestertii plus one for every colonist you have on the board. – The card is correct. The rulebook has a slightly older version of the rule, which was modified last-minute to make the Colonist more useful early in the game, when you do not have that many colonists on the board. The problem I have is buying games like Concordia is always a risk for me. My family aren’t keen on playing games with (in their words) “lots going on”. My partner prefers to play co-op games because he is quite averse to conflict (though I do appreciate that there’s very little direct conflict in Concordia). That’s why the Solitaria expansion, which contains a solo AND cooperative mode was ideal. There’s No “I” In “TEAM”

What Curators Say

Build the greatest trade empire of ancient Rome!Concordia: Digital Edition is a faithful adaptation of a strategic board game ranked in Top 20 board games of all time. Plan ahead and make crucial decisions every turn. Always be prepared to make a trade off - your actions can very well benefit other players as well as yourself. Players are not allowed to trade goods with each other. Goods and coins are considered to be unlimited. The number of colonists is restricted to 6 per player.