Play Experiment #2
El Grande
A Game Review
Kellee Santiago
Joni Cheng
Rick Nelson
Herb Yang
2-5 players in Multilateral Competition
The goal of the game is to have the most points by the end.
In order to earn points, you want to put your cabelleros in various regions of Spain. Each region has a point value for the player with the most cabelleros, the second most, and the third most, if you are playing with more than three players.
You can also earn points by placing your cabelleros inside the castillo. A strategic advantage to the castillo is that after the cabelleros are counted, each player then secretly chooses which region to place them in. Everyone reveals their destination at once, so the castillo acts as a way of hiding each player's strategies from each other, for an element of surprise.
(El castillo.)
There are three "counting" rounds in the game, during which the caballeros are counted up, and points are awarded occurdingly. There are extra points awarded for having the most caballeros in the region the King is in, and also if a player dominates the region with his Grande.
At the start of the game, each player has a stack of cards numbered 1-13. At the beginning of each round, the players have to lay down a card, and then the next one chooses whether to lay down a higher or lower card. The advantage of lower cards is that they give you more cabelleros to play with, and the advantage of the higher cards is that the player that lays down the highest card begins the round.
(Las tarjetas.)
Once the order is determined, the first player decides among five action cards to play or discard. They then execute or discard the card, and move caballeros around on the board.
Our Play Experience
It didn't take as long as we thought to figure out the game, but Chris had given us a fair warning, and the instructions were really well-written and easy to understand. As with any new game, it took a little while for us to figure out strategies, but by the end we were fairly even-matched.
One unusual aspect about this game is how points are awarded to second and third place settlers. These minor awards can really help keep a player alive, and potentially, through clever strategizing, could lead to a win.
The way each player could hide their strategies was really interesting, and created a very dynamic system, since you really had to work at seeing your opponents' strategies. It will most likely lead to many varied play experiences, depending on who plays with whom.
Although there were many resources, there was such a surplus of them, this game seemed to be more about strategy than about building a bank. That is to say, it was more about resource management than about aquisition.
We all enjoyed the premise - that we were conquistadors settling Spain. It was an original play premise that was really aided by the board design, and the language of the game (castillo, cabelleros, etc).
(Rick lee las instrucciones.)
Criticism
The interface had too many pieces that look similar to one another.
For example, players use a cabellero token to traverse a track around the edge of the board to keep score. Since Cabelleros are used for many other things, it would have been more helpful to have players keep score on a notepad or use differently-shaped pieces. Also, there isn't a strong visual distinction between the various card types. Action cards use the same types of icons as the cards the player uses at the start of the turn. This made it confusing deciding what to do with the cabelleros during the different phases of the turn.
To Summarize
El Grande showed us a very dynamic, creative board game system. However, like with many board games of this size, the experience could be simplified with some basic interface touch-ups.