El Grande

This month at the work gaming night, I introduced my fellow gamer/co-workers to El Grande. We had exactly five - Robert Bolan, Ana Lopez, Danielle Reader-Jolley, Deborah Allwes and myself. I went over the game and there were a few confused stares. Probably partial due to a number of co-workers being a bit fatigued. Despite that, once we started everyone seemed to really like the game. I myself enjoy this one a lot - though I've only played it three times (once with expansions). I think this one seems hard to get to the table due to it seeming to be really best with five players. I could see it being ok with four, but not as good. At any rate - I started out with an early lead which I managed to hold onto the entire game. Not that everyone didn't make some moves at the end of the game. In the last round, everyone managed to knock me out of first place in every place I was going to score in - with the stupid Castillo. Luckily in the last round, there was a "score first place only" in every region action that accounted me a good sum of points which let me hold out. Ana managed to be within a few points - she was in second most of game. Danielle kind of mis-understood the scoring and didn't score well in the first scoring, but made up ground in the last two to finish in the middle of the pack. Robert and Deborah were fighting to avoid last, but Deborah managed to eck out two more points than Robert.