Lords of Waterdeep VS El Grande

Who is the Grandest Lord?

In the battle between these two board games the similarities are plenty: both are competitive, both require tactics, both play the same number of players, both take a similar amount of time to play, and both have some really nice components and mechanics. Their methods vary though as El Grande is pure territory control while Waterdeep uses worker placement in a bid to finish more quests than your opponents.

En garde!

For me, the deciding factor is the "long game". El Grande's action cards (base game and Grand Inquisitor and Colonies anyway) are cool, but are quite limiting as you can't really plan too far ahead - meaning at best you only need to worry about this round and maybe the next.

In Waterdeep the long game is alive and well, where you can pull of Batman Gambits and must constantly be revising your strategy as people block your plans intentionally or not. It's because of this that Lords of Waterdeep is the winner in this match up, which is sad because I tend to always lose Lords of Waterdeep (my wife is too good), while I tend to always win El Grande. ;p

El Grande - Big Box Edition

You can't be the King, but you can rule!

I've had the El Grande - Big Box for awhile now and I think I've finally had enough plays of this territory control game to give it a decent review. The game play is simple enough, first every one places an "initiative" card if you like which determines who gets to act first. Higher numbers trump lower numbers, but lower numbers gain more troops than higher numbers.

Afterwards you pick from a small selection of actions to take to best conquer as much of Spain as you can while simultaneously blocking the other players. The King makes this interesting as you can only deploy in areas adjacent to him (or the tower) but his region itself is taboo and cannot be altered in any way.

It can have a problem of a runaway winner though, as I saw recently where I almost lapped my opponents on the scoreboard.

It's a pretty big board.

Of the expansions we've only played Grand Inquisitor and Colonies which adds France, Africa and America to the board opening up the options for points gaining and makes for a good "alternate" game play. This and the base game are good fun, and I can easily recommend them to competitive gamers.