Concord Great

I recently had the chance to try out a board game released last year, Concordia. From designer Mac Gerdts, it's a game of colonization and trade set in the Roman Empire.

Each player is given an identical hand of several cards representing the actions available. On your turn, you play one card to move your colonists around the board, establish trade routes, generate resources in a single region of the board, and more. In a mechanic I have seen used in a handful of games, one card in the deck returns your discard pile to your hand; you are only allowed to take actions still in hand until you refresh your options.

In a twist on this mechanic that I haven't really seen before, one of the action cards is actually used to recruit additional action cards. From a deck of supplemental actions, seven new options are dealt out face up and can be purchased for a variety of costs. These actions go straight into your hand when you buy them, and become a permanent part of your arsenal -- they're another thing you can do once before refreshing your discard pile.

As players acquire different cards, their strategies diverge in interesting ways. That's in part because these cards are also what generates the victory condition. Each cards belongs to one of about a half dozen categories, and each category generates end game points by a different means: points according to money on hand, for diversity of trade routes across the board, for diversity of good types generated, and so on.

The overall result of the system is a classic Euro game scenario where there are many paths to victory... though a player is wise not to pursue all of them equally. And yet, because the starting hand of cards actually represents every category of end game points, I found you do need to diversify a bit more than the average "focus on one thing" path to victory you'll often find in a Euro game. Indeed, when I played, I began to suspect I had not diversified enough -- despite my powerful on-board position. Sure enough, when the points were tallied, I'd come in second. But it was very fun to see a game fall in a different place on a well traveled Euro game continuum.

If I had one complaint about the game, it would be that all points are generated at endgame. There's no scoring along the way. Thus, it can be rather difficult to tell how you're doing until it's too late to do anything about it. On the other hand, this rather neatly deals with the problem of players ganging up on the leader, thus making it desirable to sneak along in second place until near the end of the game.

Whether or not that was actually a flaw, I still had a very positive reaction to the game. I'm looking forward to playing it again and seeing other ways it can unfold. If my later experiences are as fun as the first couple, I'd give the game an A-. It would be a great addition to any Euro game fan's collection.