I’ve often thought I’m very good for not judging a book by its cover. Some of my favourite books have the most boring covers, but I don’t let that deter me! The Book of Flying by Keith Miller comes to mind specifically. The cover to that book has some porcelain looking humans with bat wings leaping off a short tower, with the entire image awash in sepia. The story within is a beautifully written poetic story of a man, Pico, adventuring to find the book of flying so he can earn his wings and join his one true love in the skies as he was born without wings and therefore isn’t t accepted in the winged persons’ society.

I’m glad I fostered this habit when my hobbies transitioned into Board Games, because if I judged Concordia by its oversized cover, I would never entertain the notion of playing this game. Contained behind the box cover, emblazoned with a smiling woman buying cloth, reveals a map of ancient Rome and bagfuls of wooden shapes. Minor component gripe, the scale of the items seems off. The cloth is much larger than the bundles of wheat, and the bags of salt from the Salsa expansion absolutely dwarfs everything else. Perhaps it’s to represent how important salt was two thousand years ago, but it just ends up looking a bit silly.

The board of ancient Rome is colourful without looking garish, and the cards are clear, great for conveying information, which is important as the cards drive this entire game.

Players begin a game of Concordia with 2 colonists on the board. One land-bound and the other sea faring, plus one of each good, and a handful of cards. On your turn you play a card, do what it says, then play passes to the next player. In Concordia, when a card is played, it stays down, until you play the Tribune card, which allows you to take all those action cards back into your hand, plus a small reward of coins based on how many cards you take back. In addition, you can pay a food and tool token to produce a new colonist in Roma.

The Architect card lets you move your colonists, one step for every colonist you have on the board (although you can distribute your movement steps amongst your colonists however you wish). After moving, colonists can build houses in cities they’re adjacent to, for a set of resources and a small amount of coins. If there are already buildings in the city, the coin cost is multiplied by the number of buildings that will be in the city once the build is completed.

So what’s the point of buildings? Well, when someone plays a Prefect card, they can choose any province to produce goods into. Every house produces the good of the city it’s built on for its owner, and the player who played the prefect card gets a bonus good, which is the most valuable good available in the region. In addition, there is a Prefectus Magnus card flowing around the table, which doubles the bonus good for the player who played the prefect. Alternatively, the prefect allows you to take the cash reward, which resets the bonuses for each of the provinces.

So you know you can use goods to build houses and produce colonists, but with the Mercator card, you turn those goods into cold hard cash. With any Mercator action, you can trade 2 types of goods. This means you can sell 6 tools (if you have them) and buy as much brick as you can afford. The Senator action also allows you to spend goods to take new cards into your hand. Generally, the cards you earn from the Senator are better than the cards you start the game with. Finally, the Diplomat allows you to copy the last played card of any player at the table, which can be very important to stretch out your turns.

Concordia comes to an end in one of two ways. Either someone builds their 15th building, or, the deck of cards flowing through the senate runs dry. At game end, every card you won awards you victory points in different ways. A card with “Jupiter” at the bottom will earn you 1 point for every non-brick city you have a house in. Saturnus earns you a point for every province that contains at least one of your houses. Mars awards 2 points per colonist you have on the board, and so on. It’s not uncommon to stack up on a single type of scoring card to maximize your efforts in a single area, as it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do everything within the course of a single game.

I actually love this scoring system. It creates interesting points of tension where you’re willing to pay through the nose to snag a specific card, not because you want the action the card affords you, but because you want to end game scoring benefit instead. And unlike in traditional deck building games, having extra cards doesn’t ‘clog up’ your deck. You can play any card you want from your hand, and then play the tribune to bring them back to your hand at will.

Of course, the more often you bring your cards back into your hand, the fewer actions overall you’ll likely get. And the chances are that you will want to stretch out the periods between Tribunes, as there’s so much to do! From buying and selling goods, to building houses around the board, to moving your colonists to ensuring you have the right resources to produce new colonists when you do take that Tribune action, the opportunity cost of pulling those cards back is perfect.

Often when players talk about interaction in game, it’s in a negative light. You take something from someone, destroy their buildings, take away their hit points, or get somewhere before they do. In Concordia, you freely choose any province in which to produce goods, and every house gets to produce the good associated with the city that it’s built in. This leads to players building next to each other, hoping to benefit from each other’s Prefect actions. This bit of positive player interaction is something that I absolutely love to see.

It also creates a very interesting dynamic at the beginning of the game. Do you strike out far on your own so only you benefit from a producing province, leaving the rest to suffer in their poverty, or do you establish a symbiotic relationship with another player; both of you prioritizing that province for production, earning you both a steady income? While in the early game this is a question in everyone’s mind, by the end of the game nearly every player has expanded to end nearly every province, meaning every Prefect action is doling out resources at an unprecedented rate.

The endgame scoring is so heavily abstracted and the cards that are bought at the end of the game have a significant impact on the final scores, it’s impossible to tell who really is winning until the points are being calculated. I feel like this keeps everyone engaged and active for the entirety of the game.

Concordia sits high on both the boardgamegeek.com ranking list, and in my personal top 100 games list, for good reasons. It’s a fairly easy game to play, yet it has depth. There’s mastery to be discovered here, and the positive player interaction ensures that no player leaves with a sour taste in their mouth. The gameplay is smooth, the rule teach is unobtrusive, there’s a ton of maps to buy for instant variability, it really is the whole package for any euro-gamer.

There aren’t many games that I would call a “must play”, but Concordia absolutely is one of them. I don’t own Concordia myself, but only because one of my close friends owns it, plus multiple expansions. But let me tell you, if he or I ever move away from each other, Concordia will be the first game I buy to replace the gaping hole that will be created when my game group is torn asunder.