Tag Archives: Concordia: Balearica / Cyprus

7th January 2025

Blue and Pink were early for a change and had mostly finished their supper when everyone else arrived. The “Feature Game” was to be Concordia Venus which is a reimplementation of Concordia, but can also be played with an upgrade-expansion to the original game. Concordia is a strategy game of economic development in Roman times and although the rules are relatively simple, the game has a lot of depth. Plum had been super-keen to play this, and, as it turned out, there were several others who were also very keen to give it a go, so as a result, there were soon two games underway.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first of these involved Plum, Sapphire and Teal, playing with Burgundy‘s copy of the original Concordia with the Venus expansion. This was one of Burgundy‘s favourite games and many people in the group fondly remember being taught it by him. Game play is super-simple: each player has a hand of cards, so on their turn, they play one and do what it says. And that is all there is to it. Players start with a hand of seven Personality Cards which provide a simple array of actions: move Colonists and build, produce Resources, trade Resources, use another player’s most recently played Card, buy more Cards, recycle their Card deck.

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Players use their Consul card to buy more Personality Cards during the game. As well as providing more and increasingly powerful options, they are also key to scoring. Each card is related to an ancient god who rewards its owner with victory points according to different scoring criteria. This reward is then multiplied by the number of Cards the player has that are dedicated to that god. For example, Saturnus rewards players for having buildings in different provinces. If a player has built in seven different provinces and has four cards dedicated to Saturnus, they receive twenty-eight points.

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The game ends either after a player purchases the last card from the display, or after one player builds their fifteenth house after which everyone else completes their final turn before scoring. One of the things that is very clever about the game is how much variety is achieved from very little variation. Players all begin with the same starting cards and the same resources; the only change from game to game is the order the Cards appear in the market and the distribution of City Resource tiles at the start of the game which dictate which cities produce what. With these small variations the game can change hugely as players fight to control the area that gives the most lucrative cities during the game and when combined with their Cards to give the most points.

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There is even more variation to be had with alternative maps, but the reimplementation of Concordia, Venus, introduces an eighth Card to the starting hand (the Magister, which allows a player to repeat their previous action), the addition of the Minerva scoring Cards (which give players extra points for each city of the type indicated by the specialist), as well as three new maps (Cyprus, Hellas and Ionium). These can also be added to the base game using a combination of the Venus expansion and the Balearica / Cyprus expansion; this was was the version Plum, Sapphire and Teal played, which meant they started by sorting out what they needed to play the game.

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The group chose to use the Ionium map from the Venus expansion as it plays well with three. Sapphire had a positively storming game—he was perhaps helped by the fact that Teal and Plum started the game by heading east leaving Sapphire to explore the west unopposed, but he still had to make it work for him. And make it work he did, with two turns in which he claimed four cities. Later in the game, he made good use of his Diplomat Card to copy the Consul Plum had used. Sapphire had a couple of Provinces to himself so Prefecting in those areas helped only him. Teal and Plum had both built in a couple of Cloth-rich areas, but Plum wasn’t always able to make the best of hers and on two occasions her storage are was full when she could have received goods.

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In the end game scoring, Sapphire led in the Jupiter, Saturn and Venus scoring and jointly in the Mars scoring. To top that, he also triggered the end of the game giving him the Concordia Card (and seven points) as well as getting fifteen points for the Minerva scoring with his Smith card. As a result, he finished with a hundred and twenty-nine points, sixteen more than Teal who finished a very creditable third in a game where it is notoriously hard to to well in the first game. Meanwhile, Black and Byzantium were leading another game of Concordia, with Purple and Cobalt.

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As Cobalt was new to the game, this group played with the classic Imperium map and included the intermediate individual scoring for each player when they played their Tribune card for the first time. Black spread out over the board while Purple and Byzantium were more restrained, with Byzantium only spreading his tentacles at the end of the game Cobalt collected a lot of Cards, although Byzantium had most of the Colonist Cards. Despite the differences in approach, this game was really tight, so much so that Black and Byzantium tied for victory on one hundred and forty-nine points with Cobalt some fifteen points behind.

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As is always the case when there is a tie, there was a rummage in the rule book for a tie-break. In this case, the tie is won by the player owning the Præfectus Magnus Card, or by the tied player who would receive him next in the course of the game. This nominally went to Black, but it was agreed this was a rubbish tie-break rule as players can’t plan for this and just get given it when someone else plays their Prefect Card. While all this harmony was on-going, Jade was introducing Ivory to Fromage, with the help of Blue and Pink who had both played it once before elsewhere. This is a really cool worker placement game where the actions have a time component to them.

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This sort of thing is not new—Tzolk’in does something similar where players place workers on wheels which are turned at the end of each round and, the longer the workers stay, the more powerful the action they can do. In the case of Fromage, this is sort of reversed in that players do the action and, if they do a more powerful action, then their workers stay on the board for longer. The peril here is that, whereas in Tzolk’in players can always do a less powerful action and take workers off early if they have to, in Fromage players only have four workers and it is very easy to end up with all of them sat on the board leaving people unable to do anything at all. Fromage has proved popular since its release just before Christmas, and as a result, it is on its second Tuesday outing already.

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The actions are tied up in four “mini-games” which players take it in turns to participate in. It has proven quite a popular little game because once everyone knows how to play, there is relatively little down time and despite playing different areas at different times, quite a lot of interaction. Players simultaneously choose where to place their workers, in their quadrant of the board, and once everyone is done, the board is turned and then players retrieve any workers they can and then place workers on their next quadrant. Players score points for occupying tables in the Bistro quadrant, holding the majority in regions in the Villes quadrant, filling different tables in the Fromagerie quadrant, occupying contiguous areas in the Festival quadrant, and for fulfilling Orders.

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This time, the game was very close, especially between Ivory and Pink, despite there being a lot of different strategies at play. Pink, for example, scored very heavily for the Bistro getting forty-five points (more than half his total) from the one location. In contrast, Blue scored thirty points for her contracts and nineteen from the Fromagerie, but very little anywhere else, while Ivory and Jade scored much more evenly in the different categories. There was only one point between Pink and Ivory in the final reckoning, however, with Pink’s eighty-one just giving him victory. With the rest of the group remembering Burgundy while playing Concordia, it seemed only fitting that this group should move on to another of Burgundy’s favourites: Splendor.

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Burgundy was almost unbeatable at Splendor and at one point had a two-year unbeaten run on Tuesdays—so much so that others in the group would choose to play Splendor when he was occupied elsewhere, just to break the monotony! The game is quite simple: on their turn, players either take Gem-stone chips, or use them to buy Cards. The Cards act as a perpetual source of Gems. Thus, the aim of the game is to build a robust engine to enable players to buy the more expensive Cards that also give points, or allow players to collect Noble tiles for having sets of Cards associated with particular combinations of Gems. This was another close game with Jade looking like he was going to end the game for a couple of rounds and Blue and Ivory looking for a couple of large turns.

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That was until Pink did it for him by ending his turn with sixteen points and as he was last in the round, that meant nobody else got another turn. So Jade finished second with fourteen with Blue in third. Ivory decided to call it a night there, leaving Blue, Pink and Jade to play one last game, which ended up being Hiroba. This is a sort of area-control filler game, where players take it in turns to place one of their nine Stones in the nine-by-nine grid following some simple, Sudoku-like rules. Each Stone is numbered one to nine, but they are numbered on both sides such that the total adds up to ten.

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After players have placed their first Stone, others must be placed in the same row or column as one they have already placed, while ensuring that none of the Stones in any row, column or Garden has the same number. There are typically two Gardens on each of the nine, three-by-three tiles that make up the board and players are trying to win control of them. At the end of the game, the player with the highest total face value in each Garden will score points equal to the total size of that Garden. However, for each Koi Pond on the board, a “times two” token is awarded to the player with the lowest value orthogonally adjacent pebble.

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Players who are awarded one of these place them in any empty square in any garden on the board, where it will double the points scored for that garden. Thus, while players want to place the highest value stones to win control of Gardens this is tensioned by the desire to place low value Stones near Ponds in order to gain the multipliers and get a good score. This game was less close than the previous ones, well—it was close for second place, but Blue who had finally woken up manged to take a couple of large areas and winning a lot of “times two” multipliers, she finished with an unassailable total of thirty-seven points. This was some twelve more than Pink who won the battle for second.

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Learning Outcome: Burgundy had great taste in games.

29th October 2019

Blue and Pink were first on the scene, armed with special deliveries from Essen and some new exciting toys to play with. Burgundy, Pine, Lime and Green weren’t far behind and soon those that hadn’t eaten earlier were tucking in. Inevitably, the conversation was all about the games fair in Essen and how much it had grown – this year, according the organisers, there were over 209,000 participants, ten percent more than last year. There were also one thousand two hundred exhibitors from fifty-three nations, occupying six large halls, around twice the hall space when Green last went.

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As people arrived, they received their consignments. Purple and Black got their sadly rather squished copy of the new release, Fast Sloths complete with Expansion and Chameleon promo, a copy of the new portable set of Settlers of Catan (“Catan Traveller“) and a several bags of German lebkuchen biscuits. Burgundy got his annual Concordia expansion (the Balearica/Cyprus map) and the European Birds expansion for Wingspan. This last game was one of the sell-out games at Essen, and Blue and Pink had been at the front of what became a very long queue to get it. That said, the length was probably more to do with the fact that it was also the queue to get a hand on one of the fifty English language copies of Tapestry at the show. Given the fact that Wingspan is very popular at the moment and it would need very little learning, the new expansion was “Feature Game” for the night.

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The game is relatively simple, with players collecting birds for their reserves. On their turn, the active player chooses one of four actions/habitats, and then starting with the card furthest to the right in that habitat, activating each card in turn. The actions associated with the habitats are spending food to play cards; getting food; laying eggs, and more drawing bird cards. Players start with eight possible actions per turn, which gradually reduces to five over the course of the four rounds of the game. All the bird cards in the game have actions that fit with their real-life behaviour. For example, the food needed to play cards closely resembles their diet, the number of eggs each bird has in their nest is proportionately correct and bonus actions are associated with birds that flock and birds of prey.

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The European Expansion adds more birds that mostly do more of the same thing, but includes birds that have new end of round powers. There were enough copies for everyone to play, so we set up two games in tandem. Blue, Green and Pink helped Burgundy christen his new copy, while Black, Purple, Ivory, Pine and Lime gave Blue and Pink’s copy it’s first outing. After making sure all the new cards were thoroughly shuffled into the deck, Burgundy’s group were first to get started. The end of round objectives were particularly awkward as the final round rewarded players with the most birds without eggs on nests (one of the new objective tiles).

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Blue started off very well, but then her game stalled as she struggled to find useful cards. Burgundy wasn’t far behind and his very hungry Griffon Vulture seemed to be very effective when it came to catching mice. Blue’s Barred Owl was also successful on almost every occasion it went hunting while Green’s Northern Harrier repeatedly went hungry. Meanwhile, Pink was building a very fine reserve with lots of high value birds, although he felt they didn’t give him such effective actions. With Blue struggling to get anything she could play and Green muttering about not understanding the game, it was left to Pink and Burgundy to fight it out. In the end, although Pink had far more interesting birds, Burgundy did much better with his personal objectives and end of round objectives, giving him a total of seventy-three points, nine more than Pink in second place.

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On the neighbouring table, everyone started off slowly. Black grabbed one of the new European birds that allowed him to steal food which he used to great effect. Black and Lime also took one of the new end of round bonus cards each which allowed them both to tuck cards. Pine played a Long-tailed Tit, one of the new double space birds, allowing him to get lots of food. Ivory focused on cards with activation powers and in the second round, he and Lime built egg laying engines, with Lime making good use of his Fish Crow which allowed him to exchange eggs for food. Purple struggled due to the lack of fish, clearly having an eye on the last round objective (most birds in wetlands).

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Both Pine and Lime struggled seeing and understanding the cards, but despite this, both managed to get effective engines going, particularly Lime. By the end, Black had lots of valuable birds and did well on his objectives and Pine missed out on a seven point objective bonus by just by one corn eating bird (getting three points instead). Black also did well on tucked cards, as did Lime. Everyone drew for the first end of round objective (most birds in any row), with Ivory followed by Lime for the second (most birds with “brown powers”). Lime managed to win the third round objective battle (most grassland birds), edging Ivory into second place, but the final round (most wetland birds), was a three-way tie between Ivory (again!), Pine and Purple who all had the maximum number of birds in their wetland.

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Although he did well on objectives, in the final round Ivory’s primary focus was on getting as many eggs laid as possible and he finished with a massive twenty-seven, a significant contributor to his final, winning score of seventy-nine, seven more than Black in second place and ten more than Lime in third. There was the inevitable comparisons between the two games, and when Ivory asked whether people felt the expansion had made much difference to the game, opinions seemed divided. Having birds he could see in his garden had made a big difference to Pine, though to those people who were less interested in our feathered friends and more interested in the game play, the expansion had made less of an impact. For those that have it though, the European expansion will no-doubt remain a permanent feature.

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The four-player game including Burgundy, Pink, Blue and Green finished first by some margin, giving them time to play something else. With Blue and Pink having exchanged last year’s variant on the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul (Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra), for this Essen’s latest model, Azul: Summer Pavilion, this seemed a good time to give it an outing. All three games are based round a clever “market” mechanism: players take all the tiles of one colour from one of the stalls and put the rest in the central pool, or take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. In the original game and in the second iteration, these are placed straight away in a tableau, with the original representing a mosaic and the second a stained glass window.

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In the new, Summer Pavilion variant, tiles taken from the market are put to one side for the second phase when players take it in turns to place them on their personal player board. Where the tiles in the first two versions are square (opaque and clear plastic respectively), in the new edition, they are rhombus-shaped. Instead of rows, each player’s tableau consists of stars made up of six rhombi. In this game, as they add pieces players score points for the size of the block. For example, adding a piece to an existing partial star consisting of two pieces gives three points. Thus, increasing the size progressively yields increasing amounts of points. Although this is an obvious difference, the biggest difference in the game play is the cost of placing tiles and the use of “Wilds”.

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Each space on a player’s tableau has a number on it: one to six. This is the cost to place a tile in that space. So, placing on a six-space means they place one tile on the board and five in the tile tower. The tiles must all match the colour being placed, however, every round, one of the six colours is “Wild” and this can be used as a substitute. The Wild colour affects the tile drawing phase too: Wilds cannot be chosen from the market, however, if there is are Wilds present in the market, one (and only one) must be taken as well. For example, if there are two blue tiles, a red and a green (which is Wild), the player can take the two blues and the green, or the red and the green, but cannot take the green alone.

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There are several bonuses, both in game and end game. Players who surround certain features on their tableau get to take extra tiles from a second, special market. This helps grease the wheels and makes the decision space a little more interesting too. At the end of the game, players get bonus points for completing stars and for covering all the “ones”, all the “twos” etc.. The stars give different numbers of points depending on the colour. Each tableau has one of each colour available and one central multicolour star in which every tile must be a different colour. At the end of the game, the player with the most points is the winner.

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Although Blue had found time to punch the pieces in advance, she had not been able to read the rules properly so did it on the fly – the rules are not long, nor are they complex. That said, this version certainly adds strategic depth compared with the original, without the fiddliness of the second version. Without any experience, there were no clear strategies. Blue targeted the bonus points for the must lucrative, purple star and the central star as “low hanging fruit”, while Pink went for the in-game bonus tiles and picked up the extras for completing all the “ones” and “twos”, but didn’t quite make the “threes”. Burgundy played for some of the less valuable stars and Green struggled to get anything to work at all. It was really close, with only one point between Blue and Burgundy, and Pink just a handful of points behind him.

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This was a brand new game, never played by anyone round the table, so inevitably, something got missed in the rules. In both the base game, Azul, and the follow-up, Stained Glass of Sintra, the first person to take tiles from the central pool in each round takes the first player marker and a penalty for doing so. The same is true here, but unlike the base game, the size of the penalty depends on the number of tiles taken with the first player token. Everyone played by the same rules, so nothing was “unfair” and nobody noticed any balance issues, however, in such a close game it is very likely to have made a difference. We’ll get it right next time!

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Learning Outcome: Essen is Awesome!