Concordia - Due At Your FLGS This Month

An English version of Mac Gerdts' Concorida, a highly competitive economic board game set during the glory days of the Roman Empire, should be released by Rio Grande Games sometime this month. A 2-5 player Euro-style game, Concordia only has 4 pages of rules and takes a little bit over an hour and a half to play.

In Concordia, players head powerful Roman families who send colonists out to other cities of the Roman Empire to produce key economic items such as food, wine, clothes, and tools. Although Concordia does not involve wars or military conquests, it is a highly competitive game as players compete to gather cards to gain Victory Points. Strategy goes beyond having a well-developed plan of your own, but also requires that you keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing.

Concordia boasts two different mechanisms to ensure two games will never be the same: key action cards that are shuffled between games and a modular game board design. One side shows the entire Roman Empire, with 30 cities for a 3-5 player game. The other side shows just the Italian peninsula, with 25 Roman cities for a 2-5 player game.

An elaborately produced game, Concordia includes 75 houses, 15 sea colonists, 15 land colonists, 5 scoring makers and 80 individually shaped units of goods (190 wooden pieces); 65 personality cards, 5 player aids, 1 Concordia and 1 Praefectus Magnus card (72 cards); numerous cardboard pieces (storehouses, city tokens, bonus markers, coins); plus a two-sided game board, rule book, and a historical information booklet.