The game has variable setup, but it’s really the player interaction that makes the game different each time you play. Almost all of the reviews on Board Game Quest are from review copies of a game provided by the publisher. When it comes to the digital version of Concordia the developers Acram Digital have done a fantastic job of translating the game to the digital tabletop. At times I found the decisions to be a little overwhelming, but it was still fun and simple to pick up.

I Be sure to watch your rivals to determine which goals they are pursuing and where you can outpace them! Cost of the Diplomat card in subset number IV (English card set only): The card states “Food” as cost (in the red area at the bottom) but shows the symbol for tools (the anvil). But here, even more than in those excellent games, it’s an interactive competitive puzzle, where everyone is straining against each other, trying to gain an edge in the fight to economize the best. More often than not, hand management games, deck builders, and deck shedders make players begin a game with some terrible cards; not so in Concordia.

It doesn’t help that PD-Verlag is a small player, especially on the US scene where most of the English speaking board game press seems to emanate from. At a recent game night, we needed something that could play five or six people; we had five people and we were expecting a sixth, so the usual debate resurfaced: do we play one game, or split into two groups? Like with Dominant Species, another brilliant area control game, it’s beneficial to completely dominate a province early to maximize how many resources you get there, but there’s also the potential for a strategy where you poke your nose into as many provinces as you can to turn other people’s prefect actions into passive income. When you use the prefect action, instead of producing resources, you can instead take all of the coins shown to flip back every tile to its resource side!

Taunting your lack of foresight is the tribune card, which lets you shuffle your discard pile back into your hand. If you’ve planned ahead well and your discard pile is plump, you’ll get a sprinkling of cash as a reward. In some respects, I think this says much about the quality of strategy games that came out in 2013: it seemed something of a vintage year, especially with some of the really good 2012 games only getting good distribution this year too (the clearest example being Terra Mystica). CONCORDIA is a peaceful strategy game of economic development in Roman times for 2 to 5 players age 14 and up.

Now, this doesn’t cut you off completely–you can still build after someone in a city–but it costs more, sometimes making those precious turns of saving up fruitless. At its height, the Roman Empire extended from Britannia, to Egypt and Babylonia, and encompassed the Mediterranean Sea. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Concordia is the antithesis of that way of thinking, and therefore I don’t think we’ll ever get along. The puzzle itself is shaped by everyone’s collective actions, making the first play, at least, feel like you’re trying to do math while someone else keeps rearranging the numbers in the equation.