Tuesday 3rd January - El Grande/Clans

El-Grande-WEB
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Well, I hope you had a happy festive season and managed to get some gaming in. Happy New Year to you all. Our first session after the festivities saw us go back to the 1995 game from Hans Im Gluck, El Grande. One of the games in a lot of peoples top 10. Only three of us for this session and it was a while since Garry and myself had played, in fact I think Garry had only played once before. Most of you probably know the basis of this game, it's territory control, or provinces in medieval Spain in this case. Each player has cards from 1-13 and plays a card to determine turn order. You then choose a card from one of five stacks, these cards allow you one special action plus a number of caballeros (knights) to place on the provinces or the castle. Every third turn there is a scoring of the provinices and the castle.We were using Steve's copy of the game which was German but the pictograms on the cards are pretty self explanatory and Steve's grasp of German is pretty good, so no problem there.

The scores were pretty close right up to the last couple of turns. I managed to snaffle Sevilia from Garry (which had his Grandee in) using my knights from the Castle in the last turn. In the 3 player version only the first and second places are scored and some interesting decisions had to be made, do you lock down the King or score that provinice? I really like this game and it should see the table more often. The expansions offer a more complex game and open up the board if you are playing 5 player when it can get a bit crowded. The scoring track doesn't have numbers on so not really sure of the actual score, we went one and half times round anyway, so the winners score is X.

Final Scores
Colin X, Garry X-7, Steve X-21

We finished faily early so Steve suggested a game of Clans to finish off with. This is a Leo Colovini game from 2002. Neither Garry or myself had played before but its not difficult to pick up. Five minutes on the rules is enough. This game offers some decisions to be made and as there was only 3 of us two colours were not scoring, which made it more difficult to pick out which colours your opponents were playing. Moving huts into adjacent terrains to form villages which are scored when they are surrounded by empty terrains is basically it. A nice 30 minute filler to finish off with. Close scoring between first and second, only one point in it.

Final Scores
Garry39, Steve 38, Colin 24