El Grande (1995), by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, is one of the foundational games of the eurogame genre. I still try to play it at least once a year, but I’ve never written an in-depth discussion of it, so I wanted to take the event of this year’s play to talk about it a little bit.

The Majority Control

At heart, El Grande is a majority-control game — or really, the majority-control game that defined much of what followed in eurogames. You place cubes into regions on the board and you try to have just enough to beat your opponents. It’s a simple recipe of efficiency mixed with risk-reward.

The thing that’s always struck me about El Grande’s majority-control is that it has a very light geographic basis. You can only place cubes next to the king’s position, but absent a few one-time special powers, adjacency doesn’t matter otherwise. I’ve always thought this was a bit of a shame — not because I don’t like how El Grade plays, but because the games that followed El Grade tended also to use non-adjacency as their basis for play, which ignores a lot of other possibilities.

El Grande’s majority control also taught me the power of unfriendly ties. Because everyone loses points if they have the same number of cubes in a region, there’s an increased chance for mischief. Adding just one cube or subtracting one cube can often have bad results for multiple players. This allows for a lot of interesting tactical play.

It’s hard to imagine what El Grande was like for the eurogame field when it came out 19 years ago, but its combination of regular cube placement and regular region scoring creates an interesting tactical puzzle as you try to take over regions just in time. It’s easy to see why these core mechanics were so widely copied in the decade that followed — but there’s a lot more to El Grande than that.

The Rest of the Game

I’ve always found the cube ecology to be one of the most intriguing elements of El Grande — and unsurprisingly one that’s also been copied (to various degrees of success). Not only do you have cubes on the board, but you also have cubes you can play to the board and cubes that aren’t yet ready for playing; as a result moving cubes from the non-playable area (the provinces) to the playable region (the court) because a major gameplay element.

This is all managed superbly through the double cardplay of an El Grande turn. First you play a bid card — with lower cards making more cubes available for play, but giving you later choice of the power cards. Then you take a power card, and usually the earlier players take the ones that let you place more cubes on the board. As a result, the cube ecology of El Grande becomes a two-step as you tend to collect cubes and place cubes on alternate turns; meanwhile, the bidding and card-selection systems means that there’s enough uncertainty that you can never be sure if you’re going to place as many cubes as you want.

The cards you’re bidding for also have special powers and that’s the final elemental that I think makes El Grande successful. I generally find that special powers are fun in games, because they give you unique things to do and allow you to make interesting tactical moves. In a majority-control game, they work against the possibility of the game becoming too staid — which is a definite threat when you’re building up piles of cubes. So I think the special powers not only increased the fun factor, but were also a crucial element in making El Grande work.

And that’s pretty much why I’d say El Grande was a pheonomal game that continues to play very well: foundation majority control + interesting cube ecology + chaotic special powers. It was a powerful formula for success.

A Game & Its Expansions

El Grande has enjoyed not one but two expansions, both of which appeared in the US as The El Grande Expansions (1997). I find them an interesting contrast because I always play with one and I never play with the other.

Intrigue & The King is the “good” expansion. It’s a replacement for the standard bid mechanism in El Grande, and I’ve often found that replacement systems are some of the best types of expansions. Rather than bidding with an cube-acquisition card to get a cube-placement-and-special-power card, you now bid with a cube-acquisition-and-special-power card to get a cube-placement card.

It seems like a pretty small change, but it makes all the difference in the world. Not only can you choose to build a deck of cards that works together (years before deckbuilding was cool), but you can also better strategize around using specific special powers at certain times — where it’s a crap shoot in the original game, because you can’t trust you’ll ever get the power you want. I think both mechanics create good games, but I prefer the higher level or strategy allowed by the supplement.

Grand Inquisitor & The Colonies takes a more standard methodology for expansions: it adds on additional maps that are new places to battle over, and also provides some new rules for those places. There’s nothing wrong with the new France location; its slight scoring variations (based on limited character roles for the location) point to how majority-control would grow in the wake of El Grande. However, I’m less fond of the Americas and the Mediterranean, which introduce new tokens for golds and wares and lots of new rules for them. It’s the sort of unnecessary expansion that complicates a game without necessarily improving it.

The Evolution of Majority Control

I would love to have traced the historic expansion of majority control like I have deckbuilding games, however the field was very mature by the time I started playing eurogames in the early ’00s. So, instead I’m going to list out ten of my favorites, most of which have expanded the field in various ways.

1. Tikal (1999). Wolfgang Kramer has returned to the majority-control well many times, most notably in his Mask trilogy of Tikal (1999), Java (2000), and Mexica (2002). This first game was already showing the evolution of Kramer’s design, because majority-control is now part of a much more intricate system that involves the discovery of new tiles and the excavation of temples. Few majority-control games include as much in-game discovery of the territory being controlled as this one.

2. Web of Power (2000). A fairly early game to show how you could vary the field. Spaces for majority-control pieces are limited, a trope we’ll see repeating over the years, but the game’s most interesting element is that your score is based on quantities of opponent pieces, requiring you to walk a very fine line! Web of Power also keeps you on your toes by having two separate types of majority-control (houses and advisors) that you must balance, plus an addition connection-based scoring condition, which makes geography important.

3. Carcassonne (2000). If there was a point that majority-control moved from being a genre to being a mechanic, it was here. Most people see Carcassonne as a tile-laying game, not a majority-control game, but it’s the fights for majority in a terrain that are the heart of winning or losing a game. Carcassonne’s most interesting expansion for the majority-control field? The severe constraints for how you can place a meeple.

4. San Marco (2001). The majority-control of this game is pretty plain, but San Marco showed off how much you could vary the systems that surround majority control: its El Grande-like special power cards are acquired through a you-cut-I-choose mechanism!

5. Mammoth Hunters (2003). This game never got great acclaim, but I’ve always enjoyed it as an interesting variation of majority-control. You actually score for every piece you have in a space, whether you “control” the space or not. The catch is that players with fewer meeples might end up losing them all before scoring! The result turns majority-control into something that’s more organic than the normal methodology of counting cubes and crowning a winner.

6. Louis XIV (2005). If El Grande had almost no geographic basis, this game takes the opposite route: it’s all about geography, as you can put three cubes down each turn in up to three adjacent spaces! It also varies the majority-control victory conditions for different spaces — something seen as far back as El Grande’s France, but not used nearly enough.

7. Mission Red Planet (2005). An early example of melding majority control with a new-fangled mechanic. Here, role selection helps to define where your majority-control cubes are placed. (Rockets also play a role.)

8. Kreta (2005). A rarity because it was never published in the US. This game also focuses on a type of role-selection, as you play role cards from your hand to place pieces on the board. I think its most interesting aspects are that (1) each space only scores once a game at best -and- (2) your pieces are limited enough that you’ll probably need to move them around over the course of the game.

9. Gangster (2007). By 2007, this game wasn’t very innovative, but it shows off the power of theming, which is why it’s stayed on my shelves. It’s also got lots of interesting majority control “innovations” that were old by then, like geographic basis (as you drive cubes around) and limited spaces for majority-control cube placement. But, you can also throw majority-control cubes in your car’s trunk, then dump them in the lake.

10. Belfort (2011). A newer example of combining majority control with a new mechanic, making it Mission Red Planet: The Next Generation. This one combines majority control and worker placement into a harmonious whole. The resulting majority control is also a pretty slow burn, as it’s an output of other game systems.

These examples don’t even touch upon other types of majority-control, like the tiles you can buy in Alhambra (2003) — and similar cards or resources or stocks that you can fight over in many other games!

Within the narrower field of territory control majority control, I’d love to hear about your favorites and how they expanded the field, in the comments below.

El Grande board picture and Louis XIV picture courtesy Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger at BGG), the latter released under an Attribution CC License. El Grande cards picture courtesy Gary Sonnenberg (glsonn at BGG). El Grande Expansions picture Courtesy Rob Hamilton (Debate at BGG). Tikal and Kreta pictures courtesy Gary James (garyjames at BGG), released under an Attribution-Sharealike CC License. Carcassonne picture courtesy Courtesy Rob (Mecandes at BGG), released under an Attribution CC License. And finally, the Belfort picture is courtesy Caitlin Welles (nolemonplease at BGG), released under an Attribution-Sharealike CC License.

PS: If you’re interested in my history of table RPG companies, the Designers & Dragons kickstarter ends tomorrow!

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