Concordia

17th November 2019

Sunday lunch time has rolled around and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. The 50 Fathoms hiatus continues.

Today we played 'Concordia'

Concordia is a resource gathering and economic expansion game set in the Roman era Mediterranean and surrounding areas.
Ah, where would 'euro style' games be without the Roman era Mediterranean? Probably set even more in Renaissance Europe!

What's in a game?
Concordia has quite a lot of components.

• Game board: The main game board is actually double-sided, one side depicts a map of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, the other is of the Italy peninsula. Regardless of which side is used, they both contain the same features. There are about a dozen different provincial regions and each province contains 2 or 3 cities, each city is labelled A, B, C or D. The map also shows roads and sea-routes between cities. The board also features a status box for each province. There's a card track for 'personality' cards and finally a scoring track.
• City tokens: On one side of these tiles it shows one of the games 5 different resources. On the other side it is labelled A, B, C or D.
• Bonus markers: These are used in conjunction with the provincial status boxes. One side has a resource on it and the other shows some currency.
• Personality cards: There a 5 different decks of personality cards.
• Starter decks: There are identical 'starter' decks for each player.
• Personal board: Each player is given their own board that represents their storehouses. Each personal board has 12 spaces. All resources and meeples must be stored on the player's storehouse.
• Meeples: Lots of meeples, each player has 6 of them! 3 are 'person' meeples and the other 3 are 'ship' meeples.
• Houses: Each player has 15 house tokens.
• Resources: Concordia has 5 different types of resource represented by tokens. In order of lowest value to highest; brick, food, tool, wine and cloth.
• Coins: The game's currency.

Concordia has its fair share of its components and their fairly good quality too. 

It's worth mentioning the games resource tokens, normally it would be typical for the components to be coloured wooden blocks. Not so in Concordia, the tokens are shaped like the resource they represent. Thus the brick tokens look like clay bricks, wine tokens look like wine jugs and so on. It's a nice touch.

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The board is set up and ready to go. All players' meeples start on Rome.

4 remaining meeples are placed on player's storehouse with resources at game start.

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Hows it play?
Concordia has a fairly detailed setup. So, here we go.

• After deciding which side of the board to use, turn all the city tokens to the 'letter' side and shuffle them. Then put the 'A' tokens on the 'A' cities, 'B' tokens on the 'B' cities and so on. Turn over all the tokens and it will which resource all the cities will produce.
• Now put a bonus marker in each province's status box. The type of resource that should be put into a province box is the same as the highest value resource produced in any city in that particular province. All bonus markers are initially placed with the resource side-up.
• Shuffle all 5 individual personality decks. Then put them together to create 1 large deck, with the '1' deck at the top and the '5' deck at the bottom. Then draw personality cards and place them on all the spaces on the card track.
• Give each player a storehouse board, 15 houses and 6 meeples in their colour. Each player should place 1 person and 1 ship on the starter city. The remaining 4 meeples go into their storehouse, each meeple takes up 1 space in the storehouse.
• Each player is given some starting currency and resources, the resources must go on to the storehouse board.
• Finally, give a starting deck to each player. Players keep their entire deck in their hand at all times, when cards are played, they go into a discard pile.

So now we can go on to the actual game play.

The very basics of Concordia are simple: The active player plays a card from their hand carries out the action(s) listed on it.
Personality cards can be acquired which perform other actions or are better versions of the starter cards.
The starter cards are: 

• Architect: Playing the Architect card allows the active player to move their colonists (Meeples). The amount of spaces that meeples can be moved is equal to the number of meeples the active player has on the board (At the start a player will have 2 moves.), This can be split amongst the players meeples as they see fit. Movement is a little unusual in Concordia. Obviously 'person' meeples travel by road and 'ship' meeples by sea. But when meeples move they don't move from city to city, they stop on the route between 2 cities instead. A meeple cannot occupy the same space as another meeple. Once the active player has finished moving their meeples, they can build a house on any city that is adjacent to any road/sea route that the active player has a meeple positioned on. Building a house costs currency and resources (The resources required depend upon what the city produces.). Building a house on a city that already has another player's house on it is possible, but costs more currency (But not more resources.).
• Diplomat: Playing the Diplomat allows the active player to copy the topmost card in any other player's discard pile and thus use it's abilities.
• Mercator: Playing the Mercator allows the active player to take 3 currency from the bank. The active player can also perform exactly 2 trades. Each trade allows the active player to buy/sell any amount of a single resource provided they have enough currency/storehouse space to manage it.
• Prefect: Every player starts with 2 of these cards. This card gives the active player the choice to perform one of two different but related actions. The first action is to collect resources. The active player chooses a province and receives the resource displayed on the bonus marker in the province's status box, additionally every player who has a house on a city in the chosen region will receive a resource of the type that the city produces. Then the bonus marker is turned over to the side that shows currency. The second action is to collect currency equal to what is shown on all the 'flipped' bonus markers. When this action is chosen, all bonus markers are put on to their 'resource side.
• Senator: The Senator card allows the active player to buy up to 2 cards from the personality card track. Obviously there is a cost, this is determined from 2 sources, first the cost on the card and secondly the cost on the card track, cards on the left are cheaper than those on the right. When cards are bought, the remaining cards to the right are slid left to fill the gap and new cards are added to spaces on the right. This is a 'conveyor belt' mechanic seen in several other games.
• Tribune: When played, the Tribune card does 3 actions. It allows the active player to take their discard pile and return it to their hand. Secondly, if the active player is retrieving more than 3 cards from the discard pile, they acquire currency. Thirdly, the player can choose to add a new person or ship meeple to the board, after paying the resource cost.

Additional cards
There are more types of cards available in the personality deck. There are specialist cards for each type of resource that allows the player possibly gain extra resources. There are also improved versions of starter cards and cards that make certain actions easier to perform.

There are some more rules, but this is the gist of it

Endgame
There are 2 ways to trigger the endgame. If all the personality cards are bought or if a player builds or their houses. Then the final round is completed.

Scoring is quite detailed and involved, in fact almost convoluted.
All cards are attributed to 1 of 6 Roman gods such as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars etc.
Each 'god' is scored differently: Mars for example, will score a player 2 victory points per meeple they have on the board per Mars card​.

All victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Endgame was triggered when the blue player placed their 15th house.

See the spread of cards acquired by the yellow player.

The yellow player invested heavily in wine!

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Overall
Here's the thing, I quite like Concordia, but I can't put my finger on exactly why?

Maybe it's because it's a game about expansion and empire building, but a mercantile empire and not a military one. There is no direct conflict and the worse you can do to another player is to buy a personality card they want, or maybe block a route they want to use. It's all feels very 'eurogame'.

Or maybe it's the deck building element. I feel there's something engrossing about having limited actions and needing to optimise strategies accordingly.
Thinking about it, if there was too much direct competition between players, the deck building and planning wouldn't work so well within the game.

Finally, I thought I would mention the scoring. Because there's 6 different ways to score, it's almost as if you don't need to think about the scoring and can just concentrate on building up your trade empire and let the points take care of themselves.

But anyway, all in all, Concordia is a game I enjoy playing.