Players take on the role of leaders in the Roman dynasty who are tasked with growing their empire, settling in new regions, trading goods, and acquiring new cards to score the most victory points. Always be prepared to make a trade-off - your actions can very well benefit other players as well as yourself. Concordia is a strategy game that requires advance planning and consideration of your opponent's moves. If you can’t tell already I’m a huge fan of this adaptation, it’s not often I’m so blown away by an app version of a game when I’ve not already played the physical game a tonne but this one has made me want to get the physical game to the table which is high praise indeed.

If you had 3 colonists at the end of the game and 4 cards which had Mars on them then you would score 24 VP; 6 for the 3 colonists multiplied by the 4 copies of the Mars cards you have. Once other players see that someone could score big in this way, I find that a “hate draft” becomes important late in the game.Concordia is an advertisement for the best that Euro games have to offer: simple rules, tense decisions, player interaction (without overt player conflict), and near limitless replayability. Concordia is an excellent game, the best game I learned in 2016, and one of the best I’ve ever played. A tight worker placement game with some interesting deck-building mechanics and no dice, this game rewards replays. I think the brilliance here isn’t so much one of originality but of being, in each individual mechanism, better than you would expect. These are me, plus three fictitious amalgams drawn from observing my friends, and their respective quirks and play styles.

I’ve been learning and playing a lot of new games recently, but none of them have made the impression that Concordia has after only one play. If another player has an incentive to use the Prefect to produce in a region you’re in, so much the better: you get the benefit and don’t have to play your own card to get it. I think Concordia is a nigh perfect game, but there are a couple of things that some players might not like. Concordia presents a well designed, balanced, gaming experience that abstract strategy fans will appreciate.

The double-sided player aid includes a reminder of how each god scores and how much it costs to build in each city.

Combining my first two worries a bit, I also worry that this game will have that Puerto Rico problem, where there’s so much interaction between the players that a new player making the wrong play at the wrong time can allow a more experienced player to catapult into victory courtesy of their blunder. That player receives the Concordia card (which offers a 7 point bonus), and each other player gets one more turn. Concordia is a puzzle, one that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve played anything like Terra Mystica or Tzolk’in.Most players will be able to plan out multiple turns in advance as a result, which makes play flow quickly.