Matt DeHayes
United States
Granite Bay
California
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After finally working our way through every other variation of El Grande we had, we sat down last night and played our first game of Grandissimo. The general concensus was that this was the best of the variants.
An interesting thing happened before the last scoring round worth mentioning. In round 7, the red player played the Revolution card (which puts the King in the Castillo until the next scoring round when he is then released "in exile" to Portugal) and the green Grande was declared the new King per the card rules. To clarify, that meant that the green Grande, for the rest of the game, was to double as the green player's Grande as well as the King and could be moved around as normal per King rules. So, if before the final scoring, the green player somehow got a first place scoring where his Grande/King was, he would get a +4 bonus. We found that development interesting but then things got strange.
The blue player played Coupe (which requires all Grandes but his own to be placed in the Castillo until the next scoring round when they are then released to the location secretly selected on their discs). For the rest of the game there wasn't going to be a King on the board! I recalled that at the end of the Grandissimo rules the author wrote that not all card combinations were played out during play-testing and that if we came across something weird we were to just make the best of it. I didn't think much of it at the time but we had to make a decision on what this meant. So, we decided that since there weren't any adjacent regions to the King, players could only place new caballaros in the Castillo. This made the ship and those special actions that manipulated caballaros a LOT more important. Traffic in Spain, for the most part, came to a grinding halt for the remainder of the game.
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Judit Szepessy
Canada
London
Canada
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Do you think it was good not to have a King on the board? Did you like the gameplay like this? What does this add to the gameplay ? Or would you rather not have this option?
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