Designed by: Richard Ulrich,Wolfgang Kramer
In El Grande each player represents a lord of medieval Spain trying to assert their influence in the various regions as the king’s power wains. It takes place over 9 rounds and scoring takes place in rounds 3, 6, and 9.
The board itself is a map of Spain and the game is a mix of bidding for turn order and, having done so, choosing one of five available action cards and using it to both add your caballeros to the board – which represent your influence in a chosen region/s – and utilising the action on the card itself.
The action cards all have a simple explanation on them, and they allow players to manipulate the board in their favour. As well as the board, where everybody’s influence is visible, players can also throw their caballeros in the Castillo – a tower where the caballeros nestling within can be added to a secretly-decided region during the scoring rounds.
The rules for El Grande are not difficult – but as with games like chess, a relatively simple rule-set holds great depth. Players don’t get their used bidding cards back, so they have to be carefully rationed so as not to leave them with low bidding cards at the game’s conclusion. And there are other balances to be struck – between getting lots more caballeros on the board, or manipulating the ones that are already there.
In a crowded market of increasingly sophisticated games, El Grande holds up exceedingly well, despite appearing as long ago as 1995.
There's no outright fighting, but every player is struggling to control an area and will at some point find themselves outnumbered, removed from the region, or even the board entirely.
As long as nobody is taking an age to decide what to do, the game moves along nicely. However... (see Brain Burn!)
Sometimes you won't know for sure what your plan is until your turn arrives, as you may have to react to what the other players have got up to. So there may be a bit of thinking time.
El Grande will suit older players who can get a handle on the strategy and variation is insured by player order, bidding, and the random order the action cards come up.
2-5
Players
10+
Years
90-120
Mins
Sam says
It's a game of ever-shifting situations and priorities: you might have hoped to grab hold of a rewarding territory only to have your caballeros dumped out of it, and now you need a plan B. The game strikes a nice balance between getting your caballeros on the board and then making sure they're doing the right thing - something that's almost impossible to guarantee...