El Grande

What I like about El Grande

The rules are simple, but the decisions are tense

I tend to like heavy games, but El Grande is a good reminder that depth doesn’t always need more rules, more tokens, or 40 little subsystems to keep a game fresh. Sort of like chess, this is a simple ruleset, and the game still feels tense because every decision has a cost.

The Power card system is the best example. If you bid high, you get to act early and draft one of the better action cards first. But you usually bring fewer caballeros (your little colored meeples) into your court. If you bid low, you get more bodies to work with, but you probably (but not always) picked later and watch other people take the thing you wanted. Since you can only play each Power card once until you get them back (maybe), everyone gets pulled through this little rhythm where you can’t always be first and you can’t always be rich in pieces.

That one system does a ton of work. You get turn order, resource tempo, card memory, and future planning all tied into one decision. It’s clean. I like clean. And it’s also all, for the most part, known information. You get to see what people do ahead of you and decide.

It feels modern without feeling overbuilt

El Grande is from 1995, but the game didn’t feel dusty and old to me. (I did play the newer edition copy, that might have helped…) The setup was fast, the explanation was fast, and there were only one or two rules that felt like they needed an extra second to sink in. Did I mention things went fast?

As mentioned… the second edition also looked really nice on the table. I don’t own it, so I can’t speak to living with the components long term, but the version I played was pretty. For an older design that just got reprinted in recent years, that helps. It looked like a game people would actually want to sit down and play now, and while I am perfectly fine playing older games… not every one is.

And honestly, I expected it to feel more old. It didn’t. It felt like a modern area control game that got there by cutting away noise instead of adding more stuff.

The King is an unexpected but great little weapon

Unlike the robber in games like Catan… The King is probably my favorite part of the game. Moving the King isn’t just a small positional thing. It changes where people can place pieces, it protects whatever is already inside that region, and it can set up a two-point bonus if you win the King’s region during scoring which is harder than it sounds (and not always worth the effort).

That gives the game a nice offensive and defensive shape. You can use the King to protect your lead in an area, block other people from messing with it, or set up a scoring opportunity. Other players obviously want to do the same thing, so there is this constant push and pull around where the King goes and when someone is going to fight over that card.

I also like that the King can make a plan feel protected. In a lot of area control games, I get frustrated because I try to set something up and then everyone immediately smashes it apart. I suppose I am too, part of that smashing for other players, but IT ONLY FEELS BAD WHEN IT HAPPENS TO ME (I’m kidding of course). In El Grande, the King’s region being off limits gives you a little shelter. Not complete safety, as there are some cards that can move the King again (something I didn’t know in my first playthrough…) but enough that planning doesn’t feel pointless.

The Castillo is a gimmick, but a good one

The Castillo is the big 3D tower that sits over in the corner and yes, it is kind of a gimmick. You drop caballeros into it, they get hidden, and everyone has to either remember what’s in there or make a good guess. During major scoring, players secretly choose where their Castillo pieces will go, then the tower gets revealed, scored, and those pieces move out.

In my game, it was very impactful. The Castillo reveal had a lot of fun table tension because even if you think you know how many pieces are in there, you don’t know where people are sending them. I kept thinking I was choosing places nobody else would want, then of course other people had the same idea. We had a few great “oh man, you picked that too?” moments where regions went from mostly empty to 20+ meeples in them.

That said, I can also see the downside. If your group is very good at tracking pieces, the hidden part can become a known quantity. Someone could just count everything on the board and figure out what is probably in the tower. So I think the Castillo depends a lot on the table. With the right group, it creates bluffing and psychological warfare. With a more practiced group, maybe it becomes lighter than it first appears or too much of a disadvantage if you have players NOT tracking it. It’s not trivial but it’s also kind of trivial.

It is a friendlier knife fight

First, I’ll say I am not the first to call it a friendly knife fight. In fact, I’ve had the game described to me that way once in passing. But it’s true! El Grande still has take-that stuff you may hate (I often am not a total fan of them). People can and will hurt you. If you’re in the lead, smart players should probably start chopping at you while trying to score their own points.

But this felt like one of the less personally annoying versions of that kind of conflict. You’re usually not just killing troops because you hate someone or out of revenge (there can be a tiny bit of this but it’s not the focus). The action cards come out, someone has to take them, and sometimes the correct play is to remove or move pieces anyway. That makes the conflict feel more like the system pushing players into hard choices instead of one person randomly deciding your turn doesn’t get to exist or that all your hard work needs to be erased (that is of course, you are really in the lead in the last few rounds… like I was…)

That might sound like a small distinction, but for me it matters a lot. This is still a knife fight, but it’s a cleaner one. I think that makes El Grande a pretty good introduction to area control for people who don’t normally love the genre.

It rewards the smaller details in point scoring

One thing I noticed is that the scoring often feels like small gains over many rounds. You might score 18, someone else scores 14, someone else scores 12. There are winners and losers in each scoring moment, but it isn’t always one giant swing that decides the whole game. Those tiny 1 point victories you get add up and I honestly think the people at my table overlooked them a bit.

That makes the game feel like you’re building a lead through lots of little good choices, some good timing, and some luck based on what cards were available. It doesn’t feel like a Euro where you commit to one giant engine and ride it for the whole game as a ride or die type of strategy. In my game, I felt like every turn I thought… hmm… I’m going to thing A, then the board pushed me into doing something else immediately.

I liked that here. Sometimes being forced to change plans is annoying. In El Grande, it mostly felt like the point.