Last week I played Concordia with the Salsa expansion for the second time. I had a pretty bad experience with this game the first time I played it, pre-Covid, and I always wanted to try it again. It’s a game that is held in high regard by many and definitely deserved a second chance.

Concordia mid-game

Quick background

I initially played this game when I was co-running the Wicklow Meeples board gaming group in Wicklow Town. Jumping into a 5 player game with 4 other seasoned Concordia players might have been my first mistake. While I tried to make sense of my cards the others rattled through their opening turns. Not wanting to slow the game down I played with no real tactics in mind. Looking back I was probably out of the game after about 4 turns, with no real chance of making the ground back up. This made the game drag on forever and my turns were irrelevant to the overall game. Crap experience, but I always put it down to the situation at the table. With all of this in mind I went into a 3 player game, with a good grasp of the rules and an open, hopeful mind.

Torn

One thing I am sure of after my second play of Concordia is that it is a very good game. It is quite tight mechanically and the Salsa expansion slots in well on top of the main game. One potential area of imbalance is with one or two of the Forum powers that players can attain, but on the whole they were good. There is just enough scarcity in the game for it to feel challenging, but not overly frustrating. And player interaction is never directly negative, and sometimes positive.

With all of this in mind I struggle to understand why I felt bored for large parts of the game. And counting up the points at the end to see who won felt quite anticlimactic. But saying this, I don’t think this was shared by my fellow players. I did lose the game by a decent margin, but that rarely takes away from my enjoyment of a game for me. I enjoy figuring out the challenge in front of me and thinking about how I might change strategy the next time I play.

The conclusion that I keep coming back to in my mind is that I felt like I wasn’t doing anything during the game, bar ‘playing the game’. The game didn’t motivate me to care too much about my actions outside of the mechanics themselves. I generally prefer a game to have enough thematic hooks to push me in a certain direction. I’m not a natural min-maxer. Saying all of this Concordia is definitely a brilliantly designed game and one I would play again. But it isn’t up there as one of my favourites of all time.