Concordia rules refresher

Read the refresher

You are building a trading network across the Roman empire, and you win by having the most victory points at the end, which come almost entirely from the personality cards you own multiplied by what you built on the board. So every turn you are both playing a card for its action and thinking about which cards you will end up holding.

For setup, remember the cards for sale that aren't needed are removed from the game depending on player count, and the display on the board holds seven cards. Each player starts with seven personality cards in hand. Your storehouse has twelve spaces, and four of them start occupied by colonists, so only eight are free for goods at the beginning. Determine the start player randomly, and the player to the right of the start player takes the Praefectus Magnus.

Turns go clockwise and a turn is simply: play one card from your hand and carry out its action. Your played cards form a face up discard pile in front of you, showing only the most recent card. When you run low on cards, you play the Tribune to take everything back. There are no rounds as such. Play continues until someone buys the last card from the display or builds their fifteenth house.

A few reminders on the main cards. The Architect gives you movement steps equal to the number of colonists you have on the board, freely split among them. Land colonists follow brown lines, sea colonists blue lines. The first step takes a colonist out of its city onto an adjacent line, and each further step carries it through a city onto the next line. You may pass through occupied lines, counting them, but you cannot end on one. After all movement, you may build houses in cities next to any of your colonists. A house in a brick city costs one food, and in any other city one brick plus the good of that city type. The coin cost is one sestertius in a brick city rising to five in a cloth city, multiplied by the number of houses that will be in that city after you build. Never more than one of your own houses per city, and never in Roma.

The Prefect does one of two things. Either pick an active province, meaning one whose bonus marker still shows a good, flip that marker to its coin side, take one unit of the pictured good, and then every house in that province, whoever owns it, produces one unit of its city's good. Or take the cash bonus instead: one sestertius for every visible coin on the bonus markers, then flip all of those markers back to their goods side. If you hold the Praefectus Magnus and let a province produce, you take a double bonus, two units instead of one, and you must use it when you can. City production is unaffected. Then pass the Praefectus Magnus to the player on your right. Taking the cash bonus does not activate it and you keep it.

The Colonist card either places new colonists, each costing one food and one tool, in Roma or in any city where you have a house, or gives you five sestertii plus one per colonist you have on the board. You are limited to six colonists.

The Mercator gives three sestertii, or five if it is a purchased Mercator, then lets you trade in up to two types of goods with the bank at the prices printed on your storehouse roof. You may sell two types, buy two, or sell one and buy another, limited only by storehouse space.

The Senator buys up to two cards from the display, paying the goods shown on the card plus the goods shown beneath its position on the board, where a question mark is any good of your choice. The Consul buys one card and ignores the goods beneath the position. Afterwards cards slide left into empty positions and the display refills to seven while the stack lasts.

The Specialists, the Mason, Farmer, Smith, Vintner and Weaver, each produce one unit from every one of your houses of that goods type. The Diplomat copies the face up top card of another player's discard pile, but you cannot copy a player who most recently played a Diplomat or took their cards back with the Tribune. The Tribune returns all your played cards to hand and pays one sestertius for each card beyond the third, counting the Tribune itself, and you may also buy one colonist for one food and one tool, placed in Roma.

Two standing rules that get forgotten: you may never trade goods with other players, and you may never discard goods to make room. If you receive more goods than you have space for, you choose which to take, but you must fill every space you can.

The game ends when a player buys the last card from the display or builds their fifteenth house. That player takes the Concordia card, worth seven points, and every other player takes one final turn. Then gather all your cards, played and unplayed, and group them by god. Vesta values your goods at the usual prices plus your cash, giving one point per full ten sestertii. Jupiter gives one point per house in a non brick city. Saturnus gives one point per province where you have at least one house. Mercurius gives two points per type of good your houses produce. Mars gives two points per colonist on the board. Minerva scores points per city of the type shown on that specialist card. Each god's total is multiplied by the number of cards you hold bearing that god. Most points wins. A tie goes to the tied player holding the Praefectus Magnus, or to the tied player who would receive it next.

A turn, played out

You play the Architect. You have 3 colonists on the board, so you get 3 steps to split however you like. You put all 3 into your land colonist, and your other 2 stay put. Step 1 takes it out of its city onto the brown line beside it. Step 2 carries it through the next city onto a line where the red player's colonist stands. You may pass through, but you cannot stop there, so step 3 carries it through one more city onto an empty line. That line runs between a brick city and a cloth city, and you have houses in neither. You hold 12 sestertii, 2 bricks, 1 cloth and 1 food. The cloth city already has a red house, so yours will be the second there. That costs 1 brick, 1 cloth, and 5 sestertii times 2, which is 10. You are down to 2 sestertii. The brick city is empty, so a house there costs 1 food and 1 sestertius. You pay it, leaving 1 sestertius and 1 brick in your storehouse. Your Jupiter cards will count the cloth house, not the brick one.