Overview
Gerdts's design is the purest example of the 'point salad' euro done right. You build a small personal deck of role cards, play one card per turn to take an action (colonise, trade, produce, buy a new card), and slowly acquire god cards that will each score at the end based on some aspect of what you built. Score fifteen points from Vesta if you have money and role cards; score three points per city if you built colonists in ten cities.
The genius is that scoring is completely visible. Every god card is public. You always know exactly what your opponents are scoring for and what you would score if the game ended now. This creates a completely different kind of tension from card-driven engine-builders: it is a game of pure information, played in near-silence, where the only edge is patience.
Concordia has zero randomness once the map is chosen. No dice, no shuffled deck, no hidden information. This makes it, at four players, one of the most consistently competitive experiences in the hobby. No game is ever decided by luck, and every loss is one you can trace back to a specific decision.
