Got an axe to Grande
Such a simple game El Grande is. 11 page rulebook pretty well explained feels breezy to read.
As others have said, it shines with five.
Don’t know whether there’s a runaway loser problem but in the two games I’ve played one player has stayed behind and not caught up (it was me once, and a friend a different time).
The clearest strategy has been win the Castillo and come in second in a lot of regions.
A few things that could be considered for improvement:
The concept of a gray meeple icon signifying “any” meeple (one’s own meeples are symbolized as dark gray and your opponents are white, so gray is a mixing of the two) is good in theory, but perhaps the icon for one’s own meeples should be black to really make the difference.
Though a number of cards are explained further on the back of the manual, there are still more cards that confused us, like the one that lets you take three meeples from a region or your court and return them to the province.
It couldn’t hurt to put a symbol in the scoring area to remind you that you can’t choose the king’s region on your spin-wheel board.
My Grande meeple got stuck in a region and there’s very few ways to move it and I couldn’t move caballeros back in, which was pretty annoying, though once you learn that lesson I guess you plan for it better.
Searching for rules explanations on El Grande really get mixed up with Viticulture ones given the Grande meeple in that game too. This isn’t a suggestion, just throwing it in here.
The players, despite multiple explanations, find the ideas of the Court and the Province confusing. Something about the names. I give out little silicone pinch bowls to be the ”Courts,” which, when you think of it, is kind of wild that there’s no player component for the Court even though at least one card has a Court visually represented (it looks like some of the tiles from Azul Summer Pavilion). You’re just supposed to keep them in a separate pile than the Province. It seems like coasters are the next best option, though I like the bowls.
To the previous point, the icons on the Power cards (meeples with plus signs) and the ones on the Action cards (meeples with arrows), could benefit from having a Court symbol on them (at least in the Power cards). It was unclear when to move the meeples from the Province to the Court, so we figured at the point that you place your Power card.
I found the action cards a little wordy / complicated at times, which, like Castles of Burgundy, means it’s helpful if you’ve played it before / know what the cards are (at least for me, given I don’t find it as easy to read and parse on the fly as some of my peer players).
Perhaps that last point is how the basic game mechanics are kept to be so simple - by putting the complexity into the action cards themselves.
I enjoyed playing it, but after that runaway loser game I had, I’ve got to try it again.
