El Grande

Our retro-loving game night continued with El Grande, and I was glad to finally get hold of this “grandfather” of area control. Its rules are simple, yet the game is far from empty: it flows brilliantly and produces that honest, old-school tension I want from a game about contesting regions.

At its core, I am trying to build presence in regions and come out ahead when scoring arrives. The flow is clean and easy to follow, without having to wrestle with complicated rules just to understand what I am doing and why I am doing it.

Interaction emerges naturally from the fight for control of the regions and from how other players’ choices affect my position at the next scoring. That is also where the runaway-leader thorn lies: if someone gets 15–20 points ahead from the first scoring, catching them can become difficult. An experienced table can fight that, but with five players I can also suffer a crushing loss simply because “it was raining and it was Tuesday,” rather than because I played particularly badly.

We did not try the expansions, but they sound very tasty—especially the intrigue variant, where you choose your cards and reduce the randomness. Despite the signs of its age, El Grande has gone very high on my list for five players, alongside sacred monsters such as Dominant Species and Imperial 2030. For a first encounter, this was a clear and very positive yes.