July 12 five knights meet for a game of El Grande a 1995 release from Hans im Gluck and winner of the Spiel des Jahres in 1996. My copy is “The Big Box” version but we only played the base game without any of the expansions that are included.

The base mechanic of this game is area control, however points are not just awarded to the player “winning” in an area, points are also awarded for 2nd and 3rd place. The twist on the game play here is that a King piece is used to lock a territory into a static state in which none of the players can move any pieces in or out. Player ordered is determined by an auction with a deck of cards, once you have used a card for an auction you normally will not return that card to your hand. The players in auction winning order then choose action cards which allow a number of their meeples to be placed on the board plus the use of a special action depicted on the card itself.

I am writing this nearly a month after this game play, some of the details are getting fuzzy. I do remember Garrett just scattering his meeples all over the board and mooching second place from a ton of the areas, it was the winning strategy of the night.

I know a losing strategy is taking the action card allowing to return an auction card to you hand, and doing this multiple times. Turns out meeples on board win the game not lots of auction cards in your hand. Next play I will need to try something different.

Frank and Colten actually tried to make a game of it and challenge Garrett. That looked like to much work so Tim and I just watched all their calculations and cunning for the evening.

My opinion is that this is a very good game that has aged well and will be staying in my collection. I agree with an assessment of this game that I read - “it is like a knife fight in a phone booth”.

Final Scores:

  Knight Score
1 Garrett 117
2 Frank 107
3 Colten 102
4 Luke 89
5 Tim 87