Goddess on the Mountaintop

The blog is back! (Assuming you even noticed it was gone.) I've returned from a week's vacation at a mountain hideaway, playing board game after board game with a few fully vaccinated friends, enjoying the air, and really enjoying the "not being at home for 95% of life's activities."

I'll probably have a few more board game posts than usual in the coming days, as I pass along thoughts about some new games I got to try. But I wanted to start with Concordia Venus. I loved the original Concordia from the first time I played it, and I've only grown to like it more since. (I would revise my original review to give it an unreserved A.)

Concordia Venus was released first as an expansion and then as a stand-alone version of the game, raising the cap of 4 players to 6 by pairing players in teams of two, seated opposite from each other around the table and each taking the same actions at the same time. The core gameplay is still the same: gathering money and resources to expand around a map, buying cards to enable more game actions and to multiply your scoring potential at end game.

Venus adds a few wrinkles specifically to support team play. There are now cards that allow you to take one action while your partner takes a different one. There's a scoring condition based on both partners building in the same province on the board. And while one half of each team starts in one city, the other half pick different starting positions on the board, allowing them to carve out a powerful territory that remains theirs alone for the early stretch of the game -- a strong advantage in Concordia.

But what's more fascinating about team play is how much the core Concordia rules already produce interesting decisions in the format, separate of the specific additions. Expanding on the map takes both money and other resources, and the easiest way to amass the money cuts your partner off from amassing the resources; you quickly reach a state where you must be mindful of actions that are good only for you versus actions that benefit both you and your partner.

Building in occupied cities is more expensive than building somewhere new, and yet there is also an advantage in being where other players are: when they elect to generate resources in a province, your cities there generate them too, even if it isn't your turn. In team play, you can use this to make things for both teammates at the same time... if you paid that extra setup cost to get into the same locations together.

Most importantly, seating the partners opposite each other helps mitigate the "down time" that would otherwise result from a game structure like this. In a 6-player game, rather than waiting for five others to act (even if you have a vested interest in your partner's turn), you get to do something every three turns, as if in a 3-player game. You sometimes get a thrill when you and your partner are clearly on the same wavelength, and sometimes get a challenge figuring out how to use an action your partner selects that you weren't expecting.

Bottom line: Concordia Venus doesn't seem to compromise anything I love about the core game, while raising the player count to 6, making you not mind the extra time that means the game will take, and adding a few new strategic considerations. In my book, that makes it a masterpiece (built on top of a masterpiece). I give it an enthusiastic A. I hope to be playing it a lot more.