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Concordia is a great worker placement game. You have to move your colonists around the map by land and sea building houses and acquire goods that will assist you in buying more cards giving you more potential victory points at the end. Concordia was designed by Mac Gerdts and produced by PD Verlag.
Components
The components in Concordia are nice and of good quality. The game board is large and double-sided, with high-quality artwork. There is a side for 2-4 players and a side for 3-5 players. The Italia side is the shorter gameplay of the two. The board itself is full of colour and finely detailed artwork. There are many locations on the board allowing for many opportunities to build and gain resources.
The resource tokens are wooden, shaped and coloured to better represent the resource. (Wine, tools, cloth, food and bricks.) They feel good in your hand, not cheap, and look really aesthetically pleasing when playing with them.
There are city tokens that you place randomly on the city spaces at the beginning of the game. These tokens are double-sided, one side has a letter that will determine the section of the map it will be placed, the other a detailed picture of the resource that you can receive if you build a house on it.
The coins are great for capturing the theme, they look like old Roman coins with Roman numerals on them.
Every player has an identical set of starting cards, the backs of each set of cards are colour coordinated with the colour of meeples they choose. These cards along with the large deck anyone can buy allow you to use different actions. They are all very easy to understand and look good.
You have three meeples and three meeple ships that you can control. They come in five different colours and are all highly finished.
There are small tokens that represent what the most expensive resource in the region is. These are double-sided, one side dictates the resource and the other side has one or two coins on it. There is an abundance of these tokens just in case when the city tokens are placed randomly more of the same resource is favoured.
Gameplay
Each turn you will play one of the starting cards in your hand. These will allow you to do one action per turn like move and place a building, exchange resources or copying the top card of an opponent's used deck.
At the start, everyone will generally move their meeple and ship to try and be the first to build a house on a city to gain its resources later. (You can move up to the number of ships and meeples you control, everyone starts with one ship and one meeple, allowing you to move each piece one space or one piece two spaces).
You will have to pay their cost to place a house on the desired city, if someone already has a house on the space you will have to pay extra. As you only have one of each card in your starting hand, everyone will start doing different actions. Some might try to gain resources by using the Perfect card, which allows you to turn over any province tile that shows one of the goods and not coins to gain the goods, if any player has any houses in that province they will also gain the goods that are on their houses tile.
Others might use the senator card which allows you to purchase two new cards (These cards will help you do more actions and gain you more points at the end of the game). Once you have used as many action cards as will benefit you, you can then use the tribune card, which allows you to pick up all your used cards to use again.
You will receive one coin for each card you have to pick up after the first three. You will also get the chance (if you have the goods) to buy another ship or meeple which then would increase how many you can move by one.
Play will continue like this until all the cards that can be bought are bought or until someone places their final house on the board.
Final thoughts on Concordia
Concordia is a great worker placement and area control game. I have played this with three people and there is very little downtime between turns as you are keeping an eye on your opponent's moves and planning your next move, hoping that another player isn’t going to take the move you have planned or hoping they use a particular card that you are wishing to copy.
There is so much you can do that you will be able to play a card each round without feeling that it was a wasted round. There is an expansion called Salsa which gives you an extra good (salt) and two new maps.