Medium Euro games are by far my favorite boardgame genre. Picking a winner was extremely hard for me, I’ve been postponing this review forever now…
Today’s game is… this is so hard… I guess it’s Concordia
TL;DR
Score: 9/10
Positives:
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Other players actions can benefit you
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Very strategic
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Networking is fun
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Plays in 1.5 hours, which is a sweet spot for me
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Rulebook is like 3 pages
Negatives:
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Artwork and components are VERY dated
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Scoring can be confusing at first
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Game-end can be triggered by any player, and then everyone else plays an extra turn. Unfortunately this can mean that not everyone played the same number of turns, which is a pet peeve of mine.
The Review
Concordia has the most original theme you have ever heard. You’re a striving merchant in the Mediterranean! You’ll want to expand your influence around the map, collect goods and please the gods!
Image credit to Klara & Marcel Petermeier on bgg, source here
In Concordia your turn is quite simple: you either play a card from your hard or retrieve all the played cards back to your hand. You start the game with 7 cards, all with different intesting actions. You can move your colonists in the map and build some houses, acquire new colonists, trade goods or acquire new cards.
Without getting too much detail, you’ll want to expand your buildings into the map because they’ll generate resources for you. Each building is associated with a map region and a specific good type that you can later collect. The region of the building is important because at any time a player can “activate” a region, and everyone in the region receives the goods from their buildings. I always love when other players’ actions can benefit you. Do I want to be alone and collect all the goods for myself or do I want to move to the same region as other players and collect their free region activations?
Acquiring new cards is also an interesting action. New cards are added to your hand and contain a new action for you to perform. The cards are displayed in a row and the last cards are more expensive. When a card is purchased, the row moves forward and a new card is available in the most expensive spot. You want to grab that nice card now at a premium cost or gamble that no one is going to take it? The new cards net new an interesting actions but, equaly importantly, they contain scoring oportunities. Each card is associated with a god, which is used for end-game scoring. Cards can be interesting for their action but also for their scoring opportunities and it’s important to balance it out.
I think this game is amazing. It’s really tense, especially in the beginning where everyone is starting to move out of rome and create their own buildings. Love the player interaction on this one. You can collect goods from other players action, you can play their someone else’s last played card. It feels me with a lot of positive vibes. Playing around not only your game but what you think your opponents are going to do feels really great. I love games where you build a large network, it always feels very rewarding.
If I had to say something negative about the game that would be the artwork and components… They feel really dated, dull and dry. It’s hard to convince people to play Concordia for the first time, they look at the cover and feel like playing something else. A “new version” came out recently-ish with a new generic boring cover but the game is the same. This game deserves a deluxified version, something pretty and engaging. Scoring was also a bit confusing to me in the first game. Each god scores differently, each card has an associated god. It’s easy to be caught up in the fun of expanding your empire but then completely missing the scoring conditions for a couple of gods.
I tried the expansion, not really a fan of having a wild resource. I heard some of the new maps make it for a more interesting 2 player experienced but I never played it. Unfortunately someone else in my group owns the game, not me. I’m waiting for that deluxe version!
I know this game looks boring, I know the theme is the least appealing theme on the planet but trust me… It’s an amazing game with simple rules and a short-ish play time. The rulebook is like 3 pages long, you can learn it super fast. When was the last time you played an medium euro game with a 3-page rulebook? Personally, I’m a huge fan of games with a large depth but a low rules overhead. If you’re like me, this game is for you! You need to try this!
Context Information
Number of plays: 7
Suggested player count: 4 players is best, 3 is okay, 5 players is nice if everyone knows how to play and no one suffers from Analysis Paralysis
Win-rate: 28.57%
Average playtime: 1.5 hours
Honorable Mentions
Consider these games as winners, which they could very well have been!
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Viticulture: Essential Edition with expansion Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition - I almost chose this one as the winner but the game is only fantastic with the expansion. In my personal opinion, this game NEEDS the expansion. I wouldn’t play without it.
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Lost Ruins of Arnak - My SO loves this game so we’ve played it a ton. It’s really good, plays nicely at 2 players. It’s very min-max oriented, which can lead to some analysis paralysis. I really like discovering and killing the monsters and ultimately I wish the game was more about that. The expansions add variable powers to each character, which is something I really enjoy.
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Everdell - Artwork is amazing, which is what lead me to buy the game. The game is fun, haven’t tried any of the expansions (I own Spirecrest). The big tree is pretty but honestly pretty non-functional.
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Sol: Last Days of a Star - This game is different than anything you’ve ever played. It’s so quirky, so different, so unique. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for something new. You need at least 4 players to play it, don’t bother to play with with any less players.
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Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition - This Terraforming Mars meets Race for the Galaxy. It still feels like Terraforming Mars but it was streamlined a lot. Do I like it better than the original? Well… That’s hard to answer. I miss putting forest and oceans on the map, I really do. However, Terraforming Mars often feels like it drags for too long, often took over 3 hours. Ares Expedition is fast, it plays under an hour. You lose some things but at the end of the day it’s still very good. The “card play” feels the same and it’s definitely something I would recommend. The new expansion adds milestones & awards, which is fine.
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I’m a big fan of Concordia. I love how all the things you can do are printed right there on the cards. Onboarding new players is much easier because of it. One of the major problems I’d want to see fixed is for the movement card to explain how many moves you get. It doesn’t and that’s one of the few pieces of info not on the cards while also being one of the first and most common actions you’ll take.
Reading the card explains the card. Love it.
It’s so elegant and I’m really shocked more games don’t do it! I guess it makes translations significantly more difficult.
I get it, having a language independent game is a good thing. My mother can’t play games in english, it’s either language independent or portuguese for her.
Concordia is a heavier game, tho, she was never going to play that. On heavier games I’d rather have a language dependent game than an iconography game where every 2 turns players are asking me what X icon means.
Concordia is the world champion for ugliest box to best game ratio.
The box dimensions too! Usually the boxes are reasonably similar to other games, so I could always find a few to keep together on the shelf. But not this game; I started a section in my shelving that’s dedicated for “weird box shapes” because of Concordia.
I like efficient flat boxes! Beyond the Sun is another good one.
My group loves Concordia as a bit of a break from mean fighty games. The theme and framing gives the cut throat nature of the game a friendlier tone.
Everyone in my group likes the game regardless of winning or losing. A rare quality for some types of gamers.
Everyone in my group likes the game regardless of winning or losing. A rare quality for some types of gamers.
This has been a really good way to evalutate games, for me. If I get absolutely destroyed and still like the game, that game is likely very good.
What’s everyone’s favorite maps? Especially for lower player counts. We just picked up Balearica / Cyprus, the fish market is neat.
Some of my other favorite midweight euros are the Italian ones: Grand Austria Hotel, Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan, Newton, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo all excellent, yet to try one that I didn’t like.
I just can’t get excited for Concordia personally. I like the card-based action system, that’s pretty cool. But the game feels way too “flat” everytime Ive played it, there isn’t any interesting tension or big plays, it kind of just feels like I’m doing things and maybe some things get more points or maybe not, and then it ends. I know Euros in general have that kind of reputation, but even other Mediterranean trading simulators I’ve played have those moments where a plan all comes together.
What other Mediterranean trading games do you actually enjoy?
I had a lot of fun playing Century: Spice Road, it also has the card-based system which I appreciate. I really enjoy Splendor as a 1-player phone app (multiplayer tends to take a little long, although maybe that’s just the people I played with). Not anywhere near the Mediterranean, but I feel like Broom Service fits the general gameplay themes, and adds an exciting bluffing game
I have Concordia and have played it a couple times. It’s a good game. My only complaint is the box size.
Yeah, I don’t get why they wouldn’t just make the board fold another time and just use a standard box.
I had a lot of fun playing Century: Spice Road, it also has the card-based system which I appreciate. I really enjoy Splendor as a 1-player phone app (multiplayer tends to take a little long, although maybe that’s just the people I played with). Not anywhere near the Mediterranean, but I feel like Broom Service fits the general gameplay themes, and adds an exciting bluffing game