It doesn’t help that PD-Verlag is a small player, especially on the US scene where most of the English speaking board game press seems to emanate from. The scoring is strange and often takes a game to get used to, so this isn’t a game where a new player should expect to win. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Concordia is an excellent game, the best game I learned in 2016, and one of the best I’ve ever played. Concordia is a puzzle, one that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve played anything like Terra Mystica or Tzolk’in.

Most players will be able to plan out multiple turns in advance as a result, which makes play flow quickly.Each player begins the game with these cards, and from these simple options emerges a tense and fun game of efficiency and opportunity. If you had 3 colonists at the end of the game and 4 cards which had Mars on them then you would score 24 VP; 6 for the 3 colonists multiplied by the 4 copies of the Mars cards you have. It is a game I can enjoy both with casual gaming groups and those who like to play more competitively. The digital implementation pops up a helpful summary of the map-specific rule changes when you launch a game on a new map. I’ve played a three-player game in just over an hour, so it moves quickly the fewer players at the table.

Usually, this is known by some of my friends as “Dead Man’s Land” because it can be hard to find a game that plays relatively quickly with so many players, and not all games that play up to five people play well at their max player count.

I’ve been learning and playing a lot of new games recently, but none of them have made the impression that Concordia has after only one play. If a player has four colonists, they get 8 VP, multiplied by the number of Mars personality cards they have. My initial plays of Concordia were spectacular, and while my enjoyment of a game usually peaks as I explore its depths further and further, I found myself slowly mellowing on my initial euphoria over Concordia as I hit double-digit plays and beyond. This creates a disconnect between playing good moves and understanding exactly how good those moves are. It’s an adaptation of a mechanism I first saw in Puerto Rico (then again in Small World and Twilight Imperium) and I think this might be my favorite implementation yet.