Discordia: Magna

About a year and a half ago I was first introduced to Bernd Eisenstein's work through the play Discordia. It was on a Saturday in Sassenheim and I remember it very much.

I finished fourth. Now that's not an exception, that I get fourth. I suspect that I usually finish fourth because during a game I am much more concerned with a future review and what I should not forget to mention in it, than my focus is on raking in a win. Especially when it's a game I'm playing for the first time.
Usually I think: oh well, that will come later.... and if it doesn't, there's no way around it.

But I remember that game of Discordia very well. The "click" did not come. Usually the penny drops for me in the first or second round. Then I understand the game and the possibilities.
With Discordia, I couldn't get my fingers behind this. I finished the entire game by repeating out loud each time the choices I thought I had. My fellow players corrected me each time.
Twenty turns long.
And yes.... that makes you fourth.

Am I disappointed?

Not really. Since I'm already working on a review during the game, I think that's a side issue. Besides, the game itself is often fun enough. Provided you have the right fellow players.

I still find Discordia a very special game. And I am not alone. A game that I find difficult to describe how to play. I cannot name a game that resembles it. So that doesn't help either. But I do dare to say that it is a very good game that is very well thought out... despite the fact that I don't make much of it when I play it.

The theme

Discordia stands for discord or disagreement. How that is translated by the publisher is not entirely clear to me. I read this on Board Game Geek:

The first cities on the Rhine originated from Roman outposts that protected the border with Germania. As the governor of one of these cities, your job is to develop and defend the city as best you can against the Germanics. Empress Agrippina and her son Nero will inspect your actions and honor the most successful governor.

In "Discordia," you develop your city by building farms, barracks, defenses, ports and markets, and by trading with ships. Use your sailors, soldiers, merchants and farmers to make profits, implement ordinances and gain privileges - always taking care so that your city does not grow too fast or too slow. Will you have the best-developed city by the end of the fourth year, or will you manage to impress the Empress before then and win the game early?

Now I am often puzzled by the prose I read there but in this game, when I look at the playing field, I really don't manage to understand what that text is supposed to refer to then. Then again, I don't have a classical academic education, perhaps that's why.

The design

I have written several times before that the design of a game contributes a lot in my gaming experience and the click I get with it.... or not. The cover of Discordia is beautiful. We see a woman and a child in the riparian hills of a meandering river. From the description of the game, we can assume that this refers to the Rhine. The woman and child are well dressed and so must be Roman. On both sides of the river, on both banks, there are buildings. On one side the rich Romans, on the other the barbaric Germanic people. The scene is full of symbolism.
Indeed, the essence of the game is that you put the migrant workers on your board to work as quickly as possible so that they are no longer a burden to you. A very topical problem at this time when we in Europe are also busy putting an end to the flow of migrants who also want a share of our wealth.
So far I understand the theme. By this I am not saying anything about whether I have an opinion on this myself. This seems to be the theme of the game Discordia.

This; the image on the box and the underlying theme, makes good sense. You can base a game on that. But where it goes wrong in my mind is how that is incorporated into the player boards, the tiles, the tokens and all the other game components.
When everything is on the table you see only iconography. The theme no longer comes up in the actions. Nowhere in an action is it linked to this.
And so that's where I lose touch with the game.
I see a quantity of cardboard with all kinds of icons and follow a manual with "if you choose a die with a 1 then you may do this and that".
For me that is insufficient to get a nice feeling when playing a game.
Fortunately I was not the only one in this because after that first time Discordia did not come out again.

But since a while we have had the expansion in the house: Magna. We wondered in what sense this would change the base game. Would it be wider? Or last longer? Would it add more features? Or, as it does in some cases, would it make the game more accessible and understandable?

Many reasons to also pull out the basic box again to find out what happens when we play one together with the other.

What's in the box?

Six individual and different player boards that also have different advantages and disadvantages each. These six double-thick boards whose bottom layer is punched out replace the four boards from the basic box. Now Discordia is a game for up to four players which therefore means that one can choose between six factions,
Each board gives a different advantage in the game which makes the game play much more varied. I like that when an expansion has an a-synchronous game setup. You are not working on the same thing and especially not in the same way. As a result, you are usually much less in each other's way.

There are the so-called Magna tiles, the namesakes of this expansion. Ten tiles placed at the start at the top of the first year, two at the top of the second year, three at the top of the third year and four at the top of the fourth year. These tiles are then placed on the table and can be provided with workers by any player. This way you get even more interaction and the Magna tiles are always open on the spot where a tile is assigned. You thus have an extra spot to place workers on. There are also a few more small modules in the box that you can add or not. And there is another module with six different levels on which you can play Discordia.

Just like a year and a half ago, we played with four players. That's not optimal because according to BGG, it plays better with two players. By the way, the result was the same. The same winner and again I came fourth. Again I spent two hours thinking about what I should think of the game and how I should describe it. Because again I did not have a fine click with the game.

The expansion adds beautiful player boards to the game. That's fine.
The game gets longer. Whether that's fine is better judged by players who play this often. The hardcore fans of Discordia, which I'm sure there will be.

Discordia is an excellent game but I won't put it in my personal top ten. However, Bernd Eisenstein should not be offended by that because most games by Stefan Feld and Uwe Rosenberg - to name just two - are not in my personal top ten either. So Discordia and its expansion Magna are in excellent company in that regard.

A big plus is that both the expansion and the basic game fit together in the basic box. That saves another spot on the game shelf.