First Impressions – First Play reviews are a series of reviews from initially opening the box to the completion of the first game, these are not designed to be in depth reviews of the game itself, more of a quick precursor. As (if?) the game gets more play time a more in-depth review will be added.
What’s in the box?
A two-sided board with a map of Imperium (the whole of the roman empire) on one side (suitable for 3 to 5 players) and Italia (a map of, well, Italy) on the other (suitable for 2 to 4 players). Some wooden resource tokens wheat, brick, anvils (looking at the manual they are tools – good luck to the meeple who tries to use this to get some DIY done), wine (which have been confused as fish), and blue squares representing cloth; cardboard tokens to place on cities to represent what they produce (matching the resources of the wooden tokens); wooden houses in player colours; wooden ships in player colours; wooden people (colonists) in player colours; wooden discs for marking the score in (you guessed it) player colours; individual boards representing the storehouses for the various wooden commodity tokens; some cardboard tokens with commodities on them; a couple of decks of cards (one in german one, pack in english – I opened the german pack first and had a minor panic that I had bought the foreign language version of the game!) and finally a colluseums worth of cardboard coins.
What is the manual like?
A scanty four sides of A4, my first thoughts looking at this is that it is either going to be a simple game to pick up and learn, or the rules are going to be insufficient and I will be hitting the forums of board game geek looking for answers within minutes! The rules for the game are in a brief couple of paragraphs at the start – the rest is an explanation of the cards. There are a few additional rules right at the end
What’s it like to set up?
Setup is easy, there is a separate card to set up the game. Resource types are allocated at random to the cities on the maps. Each player is given an identical hand of personality cards and the cards that can later be added to your hand are sorted into piles by the roman numerals on their backs, shuffled individually and placed in a pile (with the largest roman numeral section going at the bottom and the rest added in descending order). The top seven cards added to the display area at the top of the board.
What’s it like to learn?
It has to be said it is beautiful in its simplicity. It is literally picking a card from your hand and playing it. Now obviously it doesn’t quite end there each card corresponds to a personality (e.g. Diplomat or Mercator) each with their own action which is outlined on the card. If further explanations are required for the card there are extra details in the manual, but on the whole the cards do not need much further explanation. The ultimate aim is to score the most victory points (no surprises here), the points are scored at the end of the game (although there is a beginners variant where the points are scored part way through that we didn’t bother with). What is good is that there are multiple ways to score these points so there is no ‘right’ way to win.
Is the first play through fun?
The first play through went smoothly, helped greatly by the simplicity of the rules, you play your cards and gradually expand across the board (both land and sea) using your colonists, producing various goods from the cities you build houses in and using the resources you produce to gain additional money, build further buildings or gain more colonists. While this is happening you also start to develop your deck by picking up additional personality cards from the display at the top of the board (some of which have slightly better perks than the starting cards, despite having the same personality names). The game ends once the personality card deck is depleted or someone has managed to build 15 houses. I can see the triggering of the game end becoming rather tactical based on whether you think your opponent(s) have something particular they are trying to complete prior to the game finishing. If you do trigger the end of the game there are 7 bonus points up for grabs.
The only vaguely negative comment from the first play through was that it was difficult to work out how best to score points as there are so many choices, none of which ‘feel’ wrong or line a second best choice. I believe this is a good problem to have in the first instance as it suggests that there will be routes to victory that do not have to follow an obvious ‘right path’ that some games have. The fact the points are not determined until the end will also mean that you will need to keep a close eye on your opponents to see if they are employing a particular tactic that you may be able to counter.
Scoring is partially determined by the personality cards in your hand and then a specific metric your can aim for. The personality cards each have the name of a god on the bottom of them. Each god gives you different conditions for scoring victory points (VP), for example Mercurius gives 2 VP for each type of goods that the player produces with their houses. The number of mercurius cards acts as a multiplier so for example if you have 3 different types of good and only one Mercurius card this would give a score of 6 VP (3 goods X 2 VP per good = 6 VP), however if you were to be holding 4 Mercurius cards at the end of the game the same 3 goods would be worth 24 VP (4 Mercurius cards X 3 goods X 2 VP per good = 24 VP). The personality cards are split between 6 Gods giving six different ways to score points, meaning you could try to get a few of each as you develop your deck or try to specialise in one.
This may sound like it is a bit of a point salad kind of game, to that I would say it is…and it isn’t. It is in the respect that anything you do will likely score some points, build buildings, score points, get resources, score points, get colonists, score points…you get the picture. Yet I do not believe it is true point salad as there looks like there can be clear tactics to try to maximise points in certain areas at the expense of others, and in addition to this all of the information is in the open during play, so can have an educated guess at where your point scoring potential may lie – it does depend on how much focus you want to put into the game as to whether it is truly point salad or whether you can have an (admittedly rough) idea of both your own and your opponents scores based on cards that have been picked up.
It is worth noting that the first game was played two-player using the italia side of the board, the map felt as though there was enough space that we could mostly do our own thing, but some of the resources that we wanted (not necessarily needed) did cause some overlap in territories. Which brings me on to the fact that even if you are both vying for the same city there is no real conflict, if someone is already in a city you wish to occupy it’s not a massive problem, you just need to pay more to build there. The bonus of doing this is that someone chooses an area to produce resources that you own a building in – you get to take resources on their turn too! This accidental cooperation could easily be used as a tactic in future games to try to maximise resource gathering, but given the number of options during play it may not!
There is a solitaireish feeling to the game as you are mainly focussed on playing your own game (certainly at two players), but there is interaction in that you can block colonists from certain routes, share territories with others or work out which cards your opposition is likely to want from the display at the top of the board and try to take them.
In summary this game is remarkably simple to learn, the rules are remarkably straightforward to learn, but the game certainly feels like it has a great deal of strategic depth and replayability due to the point scoring options available, the randomisation of resource allocation at the start, and the number of options available to the player during the game. I am definitely looking forward to my second game of Concordia.