El Grande

(bought 2nd hand)

Love it!

One of the best games ever. Easy rules, many possible tactics, visual appeal and great tension/ interaction.

Works well at every player count except 2.

The expansions don't add anything; decided to keep the base box instead of big box or decennial edition.

Excellent. Broad horizon of options built on a simple, really elegant system. Deeply interactive, victory must be pursued round by round, optimizing your long period resources (caballeros for area control and power cards for turn order selection) with the tactical dilemmas offered by the shared action cards. Due to the random extraction of the action cards, every round can bring unexpected twists to the game, but nothing can beat a good tactical (and strategic, to some extent) play. Furthermore, I was surprised by its accessibility: I've had the opportunity to play El Grande with some non-gamers and they really appreciated the game, since their first play. Shake and serve to 3 people or more (with 2 the game can be dry, not nearly as good as in 4 or 5).

Hans im Glück (German) version. Neat and solid euro components. Minor complaints: the score track on the board is without numbers (only in the HiG version, as far as I know), the iconography on the cards is a bit less intuitive than I expected: it will usually take more than one game to completely forget about the text, be it right on the cards or on a handy translation.

BGA

The beauty of this game is that the rules and mechanics are fairly simple. Its the cards that make your brain burn nearly every turn - this means that those who want to think deeply can (and will probably blow the opposition away) and those who want light can just pick a card on a fairly ill-considered basis and still know what is going on in the game. Some of the cards are great in that they cause the complexion of the board to change completely.

Upped rating from 8 to 9.

I'm not a big fan of area majority games but this is the best of them. Far too tactical and not enough strategy for me to rate it any higher but I still enjoy it

The "Granddaddy of Euro cube pushers." I adore area control/influence games, and I find that the subtle strategy in the game is a nice touch. Not hard to learn (I teach it in about 5 minutes), but the strategy takes a couple games to completely unfold. Another plus to me; you play against other players. I understand the criticism that the cards make it random to some degree, but there are ways to mitigate that through use of expansions.

Lots of folks (read; most in my experience) play this at 4 and 5p. I get that, the turn order allocation and board are interesting with lots of people. You can manipulate folks into doing your dirty work, etc. 2p though shouldn't be sneezed at (not my fav player count, but very playable). The differences are that 2p requires much more fanatical attention to the board than turn order. Where as in 4 or 5p, you can't be everywhere, let alone defend everywhere, at 2p, you basically have a shot at just about anywhere and I've found I can win various districts with just 1 dude. K&I cards help 2p.

Decently-simple area-control game. The Spain setting is fun. The game plays smoothly and there is very little downtime.

Great area controll and influence building game. The grandfather to many new games but a grand old sire. Very enjoyable.

Awesome! Easy rules. Huge amount of options. Very tactical. Excellent interaction. I like!