Board Gaming - Concordia, Barenpark

My previous board gaming post was quite zombie focused, and not my usual games at all.

On my return to Sydney, I was aware that there was only 2 weeks of my regular gaming group before it would go on hiatus for 3 weeks while the host travels to Essen and Japan. So jealous, but on with the games.

Concordia

An interesting game set in the Roman Empire at it's height, where there is peace in the empire, and each player is setting up an economic network dealing with the multiple common resources. At it's heart is your hand of cards, which give you the options for your turn. Play a card, do the action(s) it allows. Everyone starts out with the same deck of ~10 cards, and as the game progresses you can buy more. One of the card's actions is to pick up all your used cards, and get some coins depending on how many you pick up. So in some stretch of the concept, it is a deck building game, but without any of the randomness of a shuffled deck as all the cards are in your hand or you've used them since the last time you chose to reset. As is often the case with a first run of a game, where I've not watched videos of how to play and/or full play-through of a game, it took a few turns to work out a vague direction to go with, and then a few more to have an idea of a strategy that might work. On the plus side, 3 of us hadn't played before, and 1 of us had just 1 game behind her. So we all got thrashed by the 5th player, but we all learnt different things about expansion priorities, how the scoring works, and what might be important and what might be a distraction.

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^{Source - Metagames}

Given that all 4 of us were quite close together in score, even though 3 of us all thought we were 'definitely going to be last', I think that it's quite a well balanced game and there are certainly more than 1 strategy that can win. The lack of combat is something I like, and while that can make some games seem like there is no player interaction I didn't find that in this game. Possibly because various actions you do can benefit other players, or can mean you've bought a card they were after or gotten to a city before them, making it more expensive for them to set up there.

I will definitely be playing this one again, and probably in the week or 2 after the group starts meeting again. Very good strategy game, with the theme of the Roman empire nicely attached to it.

Baren Park

This is a nice little puzzle game, where you play as the operators of a zoo, or 'bear park' to be more accurate. You start with 1 4x4 grid, and you take turns either gaining a tile (if you don't have any) or placing a tile on your grid, and doing any of the actions you cover. Eventually you can have 4 of the 4x4 grids in one of many configurations, and the aim is to cover every tile on them. This gets more difficult when you take into consideration the many varied shapes of all the tiles, and the size of some of the ones that score more points. By far the most points are available from the early statues, that will be claimed by filling all but 1 square of a grid.

Our 4 player game was all new players, and we all enjoyed it, while it was also quite clear that 2 of us were far better at analysing spacial puzzles and selecting the right tiles for our park. And that's what the game really comes down to. It's a fun game, but it's possibly not a game for people that have difficulty in planing ahead what they'll need to fill spaces.

^{Source: Board Game Geek}

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