Retro Review: El Grande (1995) — The King of Area Control Still Wears the Crown
There’s a moment in every game of El Grande where someone dumps four caballeros out of the Castillo into a region you thought was locked down, flips the entire scoring round on its head, and grins at you like they’ve been planning it for three rounds. They haven’t. They just seized the opportunity. And that’s the whole game. Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich’s 1995 masterpiece sits at a 7.77 rating on BGG with nearly 33,000 ratings, ranked #100 overall and #78 among strategy games, carrying a weight of 2.93/5. It plays 2–5 players in 60–120 minutes. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 1996. It was inducted into the BGG Hall of Fame in 2025. It invented area majority as a genre. ...
