El Grande has aged gracefully. Kind of a shame that such an elegant design doesn't get as much attention
EDIT BECAUSE I'M AN IDIOT: when I said "get as much attention" in the title, I meant that more games should be designed like it. I am aware that this one is considered one of the greats, so it already has plenty of attention! Should thought newer designs could learn from it a bit more, that's all.
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Now I'll be honest... I mostly skimmed it whenever I looked for suggestions due to 2 reasons: I was in a phase where I was exploring everything, and area majority didn't seem like a huge thing to dive into. Second... look, I know beige eurogames have their charm and all... but the original release looked ROUGH by today's standards.
Fortunately though the game saw a new edition in 2023, which made me very happy when I learned of that. So... how does a classic that's over 30 years old stack up?
Very, very gracefully I might add! Didn't even touch the mini-expansions yet, the base game by itself is already plenty of fun!
Rules? Straightforward: they're family-level of complex, it's the gameplay that's the real crunch. It's actually ridiculous how easy it is to learn: the first player picks a card from their hand to dictate how many caballeros he wants to recruit, and how much priority they want when picking the action cards. Once this is done players take turns by the order established by these smaller cards, and pick an action card that not only lets them place caballeros on the board, but also let's them modify the game state in some sort of way: maybe they'll kick out some opponent caballeros! Maybe they'll weaken their opponents' courts! Maybe they'll move their Grande, or move all of their troops from one region and spread them around! And that's it: the rest is scoring the regions and the Castillo, all intuitive: typical top 3 kind of scoring, based on who has the most caballeros in a given place. There, I just explained the game to you.
Knowing how to play it though? Oh boy, that's the really challenge right there. You want to spread out as much as you can, so you can cover more regions faster. But spread out too much and you might lose points to another person. Also, the Castillo exists. Maybe you should get some of your guys in there not only to score the Castillo, but also so you can redeploy those very same guys to a place that might feel particularly juicy after 3 rounds of playing!
Kinda feels like an abstract in a way, due to how the king mechanic plays out: the king locks a region up, so you can't modify it anymore. You can deploy knights (caballeros) around him though, and move them through Spain as long as the King's region remains untouched.
The map remains the same, but the possibilities are endless. Something as simple as randomly deciding where each player starts makes for completely different games. Sure it's not as flash as a completely new module for your game, but man it's replayable nonetheless!
And the best part of it all? This game can be MEAN. In all the good ways of course, but MEAN. And interactive!
You're trying so hard to take control of a couple of regions, or maybe trying to get at least a bit of scoring off of the last places and then comes your friend with another action card that completely ruins your plans! Except you could tell this was coming, so it was either picking that original card you chose, or this one to prevent them from doing so. And everyone gets to see what's on the action menu for each round, so there isn't that much luck involved! Pretty cool huh?
May more games like El Grande exist. Seen it featured in the hall of fame in the OG guild (old-school german-style) and man what a great purchase!