Concordia: Spreading the Wealth

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Concordia has no right to be as good as it is.

It’s the most boring of overdone themes.   The end game points involve more math than an Algebra I final. While the box cover and art has improved from one edition to the next, it’s marginal.

It is literally the very definition of the Euroy Euro Resource Trader.

It’s just so….

Beige.

And yet….

What I find is that Concordia (designed by Mac Gerdts, published by Rio Grande Games) is a gripping game where I’m constantly planning out my next three moves, praying to the Roman gods that my plan will work and completely involved in everyone else’s turn and not just my own.

It’s tense and calculating and so very very satisfying.

So Crisp and So Clean Clean

I am in awe of Concordia’s design.  Sitting in front of that central board, cards gripped tightly in my hands, I find myself thinking, “How long did it take to make sure all things run so smoothly?”  All decisions fit snugly.  The path before you seems so clear.  But one simple move by an opponent can destroy a plan.  On the other hand, there is always the possibility that you will be richly rewarded on someone else’s turn.

But let’s start at the beginning.  For its level of meaty decisions, the game play itself is surprisingly simple.  Everyone starts with two characters in Rome, classically crowded into one cluster of potential energy ready to explode all over the Roman Empire in a colorful cacophony of marauding shopkeepers, and seven cards.  On a turn, you play one card down and you do the thing(s). 

You learn those seven cards, you’ve learned the game.

Architect lets you move and build production houses.  A Mercator earns you some coins and lets you buy and trade the resources of the game – brick, wheat, iron, wine and silk – in an extremely simple market design.  The Senator lets you purchase more cards.  The Prefect lets you produce the resources in an area.  The Diplomat lets you copy another player’s last played card and the Tribute lets you reset your hand, gain some coin and put more characters on the board.

First person to build all 15 production houses or buy the last card on the Senator market starts the end game.  Everyone else takes one last turn and then you count up the points and, shocking I know, most points win.

There, I basically taught you Concordia.

I KNOW!  It sounds so….

…beige.

It’s tense and calculating and so very very satisfying.

But each of those cards contains a little bit of secret sauce, some genius game design decision that make every turn easy, yet exciting.

For the Architect, the movement card, its first nice little surprise is that you move BETWEEN two cities, not on them.  Starting off with a man and a boat in Rome, you can only move the number of “spaces” as the number of characters you have on the board.  The genius part is, you can split that movement however you want between the two characters.  Then, if you have the right resources and money, you can build in the cities you touch, whether that was the character you had just moved or not.

Already you have interesting decisions and freedoms.  Do you plan to build now or set yourself up for later?  Do you move as far away as possible as quickly as possible, or do you stick close to home, where the cost of production houses will go up very quickly?

(Why this is important will come up shortly).

And this is just one card.

You see those simple elements of game play, freedom in your actions, and interesting decisions in every turn.

That’s a Pretty Big If

The real crux, the real meat of Concordia, is in the pair of the Prefect and the Diplomat.

This giant map of Western Europe and North Africa before you is split into 16 different regions. Each region has two or three cities. And each city specializes in one particular resource. When you play a Prefect card, you are not choosing a city to produce that one resource, you are choosing a region. AND, when you choose that region, ALL houses in ALL cities in that region produce.

This not only benefits you, this benefits other players.

If…

If they have room.

For in your personal market stall card in front of you, there are only so many stalls to hold your goods.  So, if you truly are a marauding shopkeeper, you can time your production so you collect all your resources, while your friendly neighbor gets nothing.

But that’s not all!

If you truly are a marauding shopkeeper, you can time your production so you collect all your resources, while your friendly neighbor gets nothing.

When you produce in a region, you also collect the highest value resource in that region, even if you don’t have a production house on the city that produces it.  When you do, you flip over the little chit which has, on it’s back, either one or two coins.

So another player, when they play their prefect card, can instead of producing collect all of the exposed coins, resetting the Production market.

This creates a delicious tension timer, where the coin collecting side of the Prefect card goes up and up to the point of, again, forcing you to remember your Latin in order to pray to the proper Roman gods that the coins are still there when it’s your turn.

In a game where you only collect as little as 3 coins at a time, the opportunity to pick up 9 or 10 is immense.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

One Thing on Top of Another

Traveling around the outside is a bonus card that, if you produce and you have that card, you get DOUBLE of the bonus resource for that region.  And then it’s passed to the person to your right while turns pass to your left.

So you can, if you time it right, produce triple the amount you normally would while also, possibly, helping your neighbors.  Or watch them squirm in anguish because they don’t have enough room.  Your choice.

I’m telling you, this is the greatest economics simulator system based off of one card action I have ever seen.

And everyone has the capability to use it.

Pair that with the Diplomat card, which lets you copy another player’s last played card, and you have a beautiful market system in Concordia.  The Prefect gives you something.  The Diplomat gives me something and it doesn’t cost anything extra to you either of us.  You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

The End Justifies the Means of Production

Some will say that Concordia is not without its faults.

I’ve already mentioned the beigeness of it all.  This is forgivable.

The Mercator card seems to give new players difficulties because it’s one of the few cards with a klunky restriction.  This is learnable.

But by far, the biggest complaint is the end scoring.  All of your starting cards, and all the new cards you purchase through the game, have a Roman god.  Each god gives you points for a particular thing you did through the game – the number of your characters on the board, the number of regions you produce in, the number of houses that makes a particular resource, etc etc.  And if you have more than one god, well that just adds to the multiplier.  And some of the gods are worth 2 points, not just one.

Like I said, more math than the second half of the SAT.

And you don’t do any of those abacus-dealing calculations until the end of the game.  So you don’t know how anyone is really doing until Concordia ends!

This a feature, not a bug.  There’s something exciting about watching the counters go around the outside track as you count the points.  You do have SOME idea how things are going, so you can, if so desired, leave the two who seem to be doing the best to last and count the points.  The last bit of game action being a race that could, and often is, determined by only one or two points.

In the end, you are left with a glorious story in front of you.  Everyone can look at the end game state and marvel at the fact that you all started in one city and look at you all now;  Spread across the vast Roman Empire conquering lands not through war and fighting, but with commerce and economics.

Concordia has no right to be as good as it is.  But it is.  It most certainly is.

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