Lunchtime the magic of modern technology allowed Jonathan to send a “can you come out and play” message to me for a learning game of his Christmas present from his family Concordia.
Naturally being a person of no life and therefore free most nights, my response was in the positive.
This was as stated a learning game. So there were going to be misplays, and time spent looking up various rule questions.
I think our biggest mistake of the night for the game was not looking up how the end scoring worked.
BGG lists the mechanics for the game as card drafting, deck building, hand management and point to point movement. After we had completed the end scoring it was evident that there was an element of set collection as well. Which comes in the form of the personality cards you buy and the gods that they are aligned with. These act as multipliers in the end scoring (if we interrupted the rules correctly). So for instance, you have four cards for one god, then the points you gain for that gods scoring gets multiplied by the number of cards you have.
It is funny that this game has deck building in it as a mechanic. Deck building is one of Jonathan’s least favourite mechanisms. Me? I like the mechanic. I’ve not looked at all the starting decks, but I think they are unique to the colour you are. Well unique in that they are slightly different. I notice that for one card (can’t remember what it was called) Jonathan’s copy of the card was slightly different. It gave more money to him than my version gave to me.
I think there may be a first player advantage in being able to build in cities to get resources. But that needs to be confirmed with more plays.
I wasn’t left speechless after playing Concordia. There was no “OMG this is amazing” moment. I had a little moment of glory blocking Jonathan for a turn or two. But it just came across as ok. It definitely has enough going for it to warrant another play.
Concordia doesn’t actually feel like it has deck-building as one of its mechanics, not as I understand a deck-builder. My understanding of the deck-building mechanic, is that you shuffle your deck and draw X amount of cards to use on your turn; this is what turns me off the mechanic – the constant requirement to shuffle/draw cards. Concordia doesn’t have this problem – you can select from your entire hand each go, and when the time is right, recall all played cards back to your hand to use once again. Much preferred over a traditional deck-building mechanic.
Each player’s starting deck is exactly the same. The card you are thinking of was the Mercator. The starting Mercator grants 3 coins (identical in each players starting deck), but the reason that the Mercator was granting me more coins, was that this was my second Mercator that I purchased from the personality cards.
I missed you buying that card.