Award nominee

Concordia

Mac Gerdts · PD-Verlag · 2013

Trade goods across the ancient Mediterranean by playing cards from a personal action deck. Your deck starts identical to opponents' but diverges as you buy new cards that both give you actions and determine your final scoring. The elegance of the card system is widely considered one of the best designs in modern gaming.

Players

2–5

Time

100 min

Ages

13+

Difficulty

Medium

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Why you'll like it

Card-driven action system is brilliantly elegant
Hidden scoring through card purchases creates tension
Multiple maps and expansions add variety
Scales well from 2 to 5 players
Often cited as one of the best Euro games ever designed

How it plays

Concordia is an economic strategy game set in the Roman Empire. Each player starts with the same hand of cards, and on your turn you play one card to take its action: move colonists along roads, build houses in cities, collect goods, trade with the market or buy new cards.

There's almost no luck. The clever part is scoring: every card you buy is tied to a Roman god, and at the end each god scores you points for something different, such as houses, provinces or colonists. So the cards you collect quietly decide what you should build. It's a calm, elegant game that rewards planning.