Discordia Review

It’s 49 AD, the Roman Empire Empress Agrippina assigns you to move to the remote region of Germania to secure the border from Germanic Barbarians while making it prosper. In Discordia, a 1 to 4 players game by Bernd Eisentein, you develop your city with ships, barracks, market stalls and farms to get ready to defend from Germanic invasions, grow your economy and be the most successful governor in the region.

Unemployment Down

The game is played along 4 years, each of them consisting of 5 seasons where you will take actions. The win condition is very straightforward: be the city with the lesser works remaining after the end of the game or have none at some point to end it prematurely. Yes, you read it right. You need to try to have no workers left to win the game. It is like Llama, or Rummikub, where you need to get rid of your cards/pieces to win a round, but it is a work placement game. Simply brilliant.

Your city will be you player board. And here you find already another piece of innovation from the designers: it is a dual layer board that you build yourself. It is a base sheet where you stick a carton board after you punched the pieces’ slots. The result is a low-cost, yet totally functional dual layer board that perfectly accommodates your pieces. Getting back to its role in the gameplay, the board is comprised of a city area where you place your buildings, an aqueduct, an expedition path, a development track, and a decree zone. More details are to follow as I explain the game. There is also a common board that keeps track of the available action, current season, available buildings and barbarian invasion.

Each player starts the game with 15 random workers and a building of their choice from those initially available. Every building correspond to a specific worker: Ships are for Sailors, in blue; Barracks are for Soldiers, in red; Farms are for Farmers, in yellow; Market Stalls are for Merchants, in white. Each of them needs to be constructed in the corresponding row in the city, in an existing foundation. Otherwise, you need to first build a foundation before being able to build a new building. Each building varies in the number of workers it can allocate, the matching dice number(s) and maybe a benefit.

You Gotta Roll With It

And here we go again with another great highlight of the game: the dice system. In the best of The Castles of Burgundy style, you use dice randomly rolled every season to take your main action and as many bonuses actions as you can. Before each season, the three dice in different colours (blue, red and yellow) are rolled, and paired with the action in their respective slot in the main board. The first player chooses one of them and take the corresponding main action and take this die off the board, leaving for all other players only two dice options. It may be cruel sometimes, but it is just amazing yet simple action selection mechanism. Actions include building foundations and buildings, allocating workers, getting stars used to advance in the tracks and advancing on the Development Track. Very simple so far.

Let’s go for the bonuses: if you have picked the die in the same column as the season marker, you get the indicated bonus. They may be advancing on the Expedition Path or in the Aqueduct, building a tower to help you defend against the barbarians or in trading workers, getting stars or swapping workers; if you have any building showing a die with the same number and colour as the picked die, you may allocate workers on it for free. White buildings are colourless and only need to match the number. And you better believe, you want to do it as much as you can to get rid of your workers.

As you may have figured out by now, the game is all about efficiency. Finding synergies, getting free actions, and snowballing your city into success is key to win the game. Dice manipulators help you mitigate the randomness to some extent, but it ends up being up to you to carefully plan your city to avoid falling into null turns. Advancing into both the Expedition Path and the Development Track will bring one-time bonuses or permanent abilities that help you progress (more or less) smoothly. The same is even more true for privileges, bonuses obtained after you built a certain amount of buildings in your city, that may range from one-time advancements on tracks or the Aqueduct to permanently treating one of your colours of workers as a joker. Decrees are also useful to get, by being the first to fulfil public objectives.

To be efficient also means to know when to build a new building and when to allocate your workers. That is because at the end of each year, two things happen: first, the barbarians try to invade your city and unless your military power equals or exceeds their strength, you get punished by whatever is indicated in their tile. Otherwise, you defeat them and get a bonus. Your strength is given by the number of workers in your fully occupied barracks plus the strength of your towers; second, since you are in charge of a brand new city full of job opportunities, new workers arrive seeking a better life. You got one new random worker from the bag for each empty slot in your buildings, plus a worker for each “worker in front of a bag” picture showing into your board and buildings, reduced by the number showing in your Aqueduct level (yes, Aqueduct advancements are HUGE!). If it was the 4th and last year, the player with the lower number of unassigned workers wins the game. Otherwise, you remove all your workers from your fully occupied building (yes, you need to occupy them again) and reset the main board for the next year.