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.

Planet Steam - New Release

The discovery of valuable ores and other resources has led to the founding of a new colony, a veritable boomtown hidden away in an untouched corner of a steam-powered world. It won't stay untouched for long, however; entrepreneurs from all over are boarding their airships and then risking a trip across the Boiling Sea to stake their claim. Can you outbid and outbuy your rivals to acquire the most wealth?

Planet Steam is a board game in which two to five players race to assemble equipment, claim plots of land, extract resources, and accumulate riches. Each player assumes the role of an entrepreneur trying to reap the most profit through resource mining. Players extract resources from their zones using tanks and converters, and they buy and sell those resources in a volatile and ever-shifting market. The player who earns the most income will, in the end, be victorious. However, only through shrewd resource management and clever manipulation of supply and demand will any one player reign supreme.

An engaging economic and bidding game, Planet Steam stands apart due to its stunningly illustrated steampunk setting. Massive airships, mechanical wonders of their time, patrol the sky over a steam-grey landscape that's dotted with massive extraction tanks. During the course of a game, players will bid on this resource-rich territory, purchase and upgrade their extraction equipment, manage the storage of their newly acquired resources, and buy and sell their resources on the open market.

Outwit and outmaneuver your rivals! Create shortages or flood the market with resources to stymie your opponents! Are you canny enough to turn a handful of credits into a fortune?