Concordia - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

well when you're making an egg for your good friend you gotta make the best egg that you can Quinton Smith I have prepared for you as per your specifications one lunchtime egg fresh is the Dickens ill juice just in the kitchen just come through whenever you want quince oh not again oh hi there big news for me I've run away I don't want to review new games anymore Concordia is so good I just want to play this game until the day that I die and though this beautiful board will fade my love for Concordia will be as strong as the day we met the truth is Concordia came out almost three years ago but it also has the attribute of a stealth bomber that flew undershot over to Dan's radar for almost three years this vacant woman this theme of trading fitted sheets in ancient times this name as all the substance of a fart in a forest meant that I didn't pay any attention to it but don't make my mistake if you like trading little wooden bits then Concordia is one of the greatest games of turning wooden bits into a grand Empire of wooden bits Shanta down absolutely recommends Concordia it's way better than Settlers of Catan my said thank you oh how did you find me Matt says you're trying to run away you've run away you're going to run away actually I've run away and listen I don't want to play new games anymore I just want to play Concordia until the day I die and though the board will fade have you got the expansion do you have the expansion Quinn's what okay let me explain to you why Concordia is so ruddy good starting with the fact that the rule book is one page of a3 this is a simple game then and yet it features loads of teasing interactions with your friends it's so satisfying as to be genuinely unsettling let's take a look players in Concordia control competing Roman dynasties in a time of peace racing to have the most impressive expansive expensive everything you're basically going to get scored on everything you do but I'll cover that later each player is going to start the game with a man and his pet boat some trading houses that exist in his mind a warehouse with one of every type of resource some employees in cryogenic stasis will free up more room in your warehouse as you defrost them a handful of loose change from mum and a personal deck of cards from these humble beginnings players are going to be spreading across the borders oppressive and cleani as capitalists Marmite there's a bit of randomization during setup whereby different regions all produce different things so you'll need to change up how you play each time but how do you play well Concordia actually has one of the easiest rules explanations ever I'm simply going to tell you that your each turn you're going to play one card from your hand and then I'm going to walk you through the five different kinds of cards that are in your deck and players can read along in their own deck as you do this and these cards actors flash cards for the person teaching Concordia and then once you've taught those five cards the game's over like the explanations over I mean the games aren't over that would be a terrible game anyway let's do it let's start with the architect card if you choose to play this card on your turn you can move and build and that's important to begin with because everyone starts packed into Rome like capers in a jar first off you can't how many colonists you've got on the board land and sea so we've got two and you've got two points a movement divided to divide between your people so I can move my boat on this route and then move a man on this route to actually have roots rather than actual places on the board being where figures stop in this game that's important also because each route can only have a hold one person so your friends are going to have to leapfrog year so you're already getting in their way and being annoying which is nice now after you've moved you can build any number of trading posts on cities you're connected to so for example I could build here by paying some money and some brick and one of the resource that it produces so one anvil one brick one load of money and then I've got a trading post in Syracuse a sass get or is it what does it do what good is a trading post well let's move on to the next card which we actually have to do because once you play a card in Concordia it stays down in your discard pile and you can't play it again the next card I want to tell you guys about is the prefect and the prefect allows you to reach into this board and take a great handful of resources for your dynasty you simply pick any region on the board those the different colored zones and you don't even have to be there and you flip it style and then you get the resource that that region is produces on its best day so in the case of a tea we've got wine that from the wine city but and you may have seen this coming we just built a trading post in Sicily ER so now when we play a prefect we also get an anvil so that seems pretty good but here's the rub if any other players have trading posts in that region they also get that resource when you play a prefect and this is the first of many breezy lovely Mediterranean rules in Concordia you end up getting caught in the capitalist crossfire it's not even your turn and another player goes are okay have some grain because I'm producing in this region it's so nice your friends making you happy imagine that the other thing a prefect can do because as all these places flip as players harvest from them they go to flip to their coin size and the alternative action of the prefect card is to flip every coin token back over so that gets you to four six seven coins and just make that much money from the bank and again this is making players happy because you flipped all those tiles back those regions can now produce again oh but Quinn's oh I've now got too much of this resource and not enough of that resource not to worry friend just spend your turn playing the the old cheeky merchant who lets you you just actually gets you three money and then you can buy in and or sell one hand or two kinds of things which sounds like a boring way to spend your turn right well no because the merchants rapidly pushes the game into ridiculous numbers like here I'm selling for cloth and I get 7 14 21 28 money here's what that looks like and then I could fill my warehouse with brick until bricks bursting out of the door can you imagine anything more exciting than that so you've been playing for a while you played your architect and you paid your prefect and then you played your second prefect because the game gives you two which is nice and you pay your merchants and now you quite won them back well then it's time for the Tribune the Tribune is incredibly boring but actually he's secretly not he lets you pick everything back up for your turn which would be bad except then Concordia gives you this multistage booster rocket reward first off if you picked up more than three clouds including that review you get a coin for each extra card just some more money that's completely awesome and then the Tribune and this is the only way you can do this lets you put a new man or a new boat friend into Rome which is good you freed up warehouse spaces you're going to get more flexibility on the board and also most importantly you can then clog up more routes because there is unbelievable joy in planning a turn thinking about what you're going to do and then from across the board you hear your friend go yeah because he's just had his dream mood move ruined by your boat being in the wrong parking space at exactly the right time oh hello there senator one moment I have some wine around here somewhere but there it is the fifth and final card you can buy the senator allows you to buy one or two of these cards from the central shop you pay for them with resources out of your warehouse and then that goes into your hand ready to be played next turn so there's actually a touch of deck building here you'll buy more efficient cards than the cards you've started with and you're adding more of them so you can do them over and over again but more importantly than this each of these cards produces victory points and finally we get on to how you actually win Concordia every card has a certain God printed at the bottoms for example some cards have Mars printed on the bottom at the end of the game each Mars card you have is worth two victory points for each colonist you have on the board so the general tactic in Concordia is to yes get rich put stuff down all that but also collect a certain kind of God get them in your hands and build your empire that way and that's the game it ends when all of these cards are gone which is pretty fast because there's only six of them per player or when one player is put down all the little wooden houses which is going to be pretty fast cuz putting down those houses is incredibly satisfying now if I know my audience you're watching thinking this looks fun it looks fine well it's not it's better than that this is the best German game I have played since Terra Mystica what designer Mountain Goats has done is remove quite simply all of the friction from these sorts of economy building games there is no I can't build there our baton was wasted every turning in Korea from turn 1 through 1040 feels good they're like what do you want this turn lost the game and quite like some resources okay wow thanks oh love every single turn in Concordia is fast the game ends incredibly quickly and every single turn is satisfying whether you're filling your warehouse with loot or running to virgin territory and building a three-dimensional Empire or claiming new cards that are radically going to change how you opportunities as what you're buying there but the really the rub is the German games are traditionally a genre of blocking of passive aggression of denying of stopping your friends having fun right Concordia flips that on its head in a traditional German game it would be you run today CA and then blue here would build some colonies and he's then denied that to everyone else no in Concordia he's taken Dacia and all that does is create opportunities for the rest of the table it's just as tactical it's just as interesting but it makes his friends happy as opposed to annoyed what yellow can then do is yellow can move a colonist in and pay more than blue did which is important so blue feels smug about that to build resources and Dacia as well and then as blue activates that region over and over yellow is going to get stuff as well and weirdly there's never going to be any grudges there because no one in Concordia has any idea who was winning until the very end of the game how many games with victory point tracts are on the edge have you played where by about halfway through someone's in the lead someone else is in second place and you're like in third and you know you can't win that's a huge bummer and Concordia says well let's get rid of that Concordia has exactly once going around at the end of the game and it is tense and exciting edge because you have no idea where you placed so we've got the Concordia is nice we've got that as simple finally I'm going to tell you why it's the definition of easy to learn hard to master or for fans of alliteration it's a pleasure to play but impossible to play perfectly ah if you think back to the all those cards that I want you through every single one can be used or it can be used what I mean by that well let's take the humble architect you'll remember that I said you can move your things around and then build trading posts didn't say how many you could build so I play might take their turn you know they'll move and then they'll build a trading post I could take the same turn and move and move and use all those resources I've been hoarding to build for trading posts the senator senator sums up Concordia because yeah he lets you buy one person from the carp shop but you could buy two with him he lets you buy two cards and if you're not buying two cards every time you use the senator you are kind of screwing up every single card in Concordia offers efficiency and that's what you're chasing and then you're rocket past everyone else speaking of which as far as this game being very hard to master on the other side of the board you can just play with Italy this is me holding up for you this map is it's like smaller than the original Concordia board it has five less settlements which means if you're playing with four on this instead of the other board it's going to be a lot more cramped this is also YouTube player map so by alternating between those two and the different cards you're going to get in the game and the different placement of resources good luck winning a second time if you manage to win once perfect timing oh now we're talking Concordia actually has two expansions the first of which is a ah-ah-ah lunchtime a the first of which is the Britannia UK math expansion just like Ticket to Ride you can go to your favorite countries in the world because the Roman Empire was full of jerks and very proactive the first thing you get is this weird headless England and that's kind of interesting is the boats and people start in different places not very interesting you get this because it's the smallest map they've ever produced very very cramped you play with four people on that that you'll be racing to put your places down first the next thing is something very very special oh yes this second expansion / Korea is the reason you don't need the Germania britannia board Concordia salsa salsa of course being the Latin for cocaine which this game teaches us the Romans used to call salt now you get three modules in here I'm gonna walk you through them one after another first off you get some rules I've always said that rules are a useful thing to have in a board game but look you also get another double sided board bringing your total of boards you get you've got to play Concordia on up to four so why would you get two more just get this one you get a tiny Spanish board very cramped like the Italian board and then on the reverse a gigantic map of Byzantium or the optimum kind of territories this is also really fun you get cocaine and new cocaine producing of salt cities and these if you tell this to any table of Concordia players they'll go are wild resources counters anything and everything and salt producing cities you can put that into in a game and I'm going to play with these in every game of Concordia simply because they mix the game up they produce areas on the map which you really really do want to get to the third and final module in Concordia salsa I'm not really a fan of forum tiles are special abilities that you can draft and acquire to kind of amp up your you know dynasty but I don't like them because sort of reading in there while reading and learning in a in a game that's otherwise so elegant so there you have it don't probably get can go to yourselves unless you're getting Concordia to the table regularly and then only then if you're a freak like me get the Britannia Germany aboard so oh I've got Concordia salsa now so I suppose I can hit the road again do you just want to like Netflix and chill do you know what that means it means watching Netflix night out

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 351,025

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, su&sd, game, review, game review, boardgame review, board game review, Concordia, Mac Gerdts, Deck Building, Quinns, Quintin Smith

Id: X9u6IuoIPUA

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016