GamesReport: 20-Jan-13 El Grande

El Grande

Winter came and trashed our planned Game Of Thrones session, but after a little scrabbling I found better weather for our four surviving players in medieval Spain with El Grande.

El Grande is by no means a new game, in fact it was winning awards back in the mid nineties and was the 1996 Spiel Des Jahres. Indeed for many Eurogame fans it remains one of the best releases from that rich period of "German-styled" strategy games.

El Grande is an area control/influence game and is based in 15th century Spain. The map and components are excellent, but I was concerned that they would give our non-Euro players the impression of a risk-style conquest game, instead of the more subtle area control strategy game that El Grande is.

Each player is a member of the high aristocracy (or "Grandes") who exert their influence across the different regions of Spain through the placement of "Caballeros", lower ranked aristocracy. 

Each round players bid for action cards that allow them to exert their influence in different ways and swing the balance of power in their favour. 

Regions are scored during rounds three, six and nine to establish which Grande has gained the most victory points by best using their influence in Spain.

It was a first game of El Grande for ChrisG & DaveB, but they did well to stay in contention throughout the evening. GaryG 108pts, AndyA 98pts, DaveB 90pts and ChrisG 78pts.

El Grande is a fine Eurogame, hopefully we'll get to use the expansion next time we play.  

The other games played were Bucket King and Bluff.

Pandemic Fail!

The Koffee Klub met at Whitehead Primary School on Sunday 27th May and we played Bucket King, Pandemic and our favourite fill-in game Bluff. It was a pleasantly warm evening and the craic* was fine. We had four players this week, namely GaryG, AndyA, Dale and myself GaryB. AndyB joined us for the last few games.

We started off the evening with a light game or two of the Bucket King. GaryG brought this game and whilst you would think that this would give him an advantage you would in fact be very, very wrong. I won both of the games of Bucket King but this was to be my only victories of the evening.
Pandemic is another of GaryG's games though one that he had yet to play. A such this was a new game to the group and we spent the first thirty minutes or so setting up and learning the rules. After this we got started and played for about two hours or so before coming to a conclusion.

We made a fairly critical mistake in the first few turns which really put us on the back foot and made it very difficult for us to win the game. And in fact we were not able to defeat the four viral strains and the world was lost. Oh dear. However we were all very happy with the game and will be trying again at a later date.
We finished the evening with a series of quick fire games of Bluff. This is a great game though one that did not bring me any success this evening. AndyA blazed a trail of wins with some amazing dice rolls and his honest joe tactics which had us all stumped. Well played Andy, well played.
We will be posting more detailed reviews of the games played this week together with the coffee club game ratings system. Next week we will be playing Guards! Guards! by local gamesmiths Backspindle games.
* For those of you unfamiliar with irish colloquialism craic is not a reference to any form of hard drug and instead alludes to the friendly banter and social atmosphere had.