El Grande 2023 Tournament Report
I was looking for a new BPA tournament to run, as I had recently stopped my Concordia tournament due to the instability of the Boite a Jeux server (which eventually shut down). I’ve run El Grande for many years at WBC, but it was not top of my list for an online tournament, as I worried about getting enough participants.
Those worries played out in perhaps an overly-complicated process to find out which format people would be willing to play. There are currently two platforms for El Grande: Yucata and Board Game Arena, both which have various issues including known bugs. In the end we went with Board Game Arena, and as an un-official tournament (since we didn’t get enough players). Fortunately, the bugs I had heard about did not show up in the 26 games we played.
With the smaller number of players, I kept it to two rounds instead of my usual three. This did mean that one win would not be enough to guarantee entry into the final round.
Eric Freeman and Tim Mossman racked up three wins each in the initial games, while Jay Fox and Rob Flowers got two wins each. Alex Bove and Yoni Weiss had one win and three second place finishes. Fadi El-Riachi tied with Mike Kaltman with a win, one second, and two third place finishes, but beat Mike on the tiebreaker.
All games in both rounds were played as four-player games. I run five player games at WBC, but four player games made the matchups much easier. If I run this again, I may do four player games for the initial round and five player games for the advanced round(s). Four player games are just a bit different. In a five player game, you can sometimes hang back a little bit in score, focusing on board position, hoping that the negative actions in the 1 and 2 stack cards will help pull in a leader. In a four player game, you often don’t have that luxury. You can quite quickly fall behind if you don’t keep up in points.
Five of the seven finalists have won the WBC event before, and Yoni Weiss has made it to the semis at least once. Each player played four additional games. Some of the notes:
Game 1 – This was a game in which I was the one that fell behind early and never caught up. The other three players stayed neck and neck. Fadi had good board position by the end of turn 6, and parlayed that into a 1 point win over Eric.
Game 2 – Jay suffered in some early scoring events, but had good board position and the lead from about halfway through the game. He went into the final drop with a significant lead, and still managed to beat Yoni by 12 points when the dust settled.
Game 3 – This game had a bit of an unusual early play where a “score the leasts” triggered scoring in 5 areas. Partway through the game the 8/4/0 got placed in Alex’s home territory, but Rob took it over and never surrendered it afterwards. A turn 8 “score the firsts” opened up Rob’s lead by another 10 points, leading to a comfortable win.
Game 4 – Fadi fell behind early, but was able to catch up pointwise in T6 with a “score the firsts” card. Yoni had better position, though, and benefited from some late scoring cards, leading to a 14 point victory over Eric.
Game 5 – Back to back “score the fives” in the early turns left Fadi at a disadvantage. In the mid-game Alex executed a “score the firsts” action that left Tim behind as well. It was a two-player game at that point, but Yoni was able to use his better board position to squeak out a 3 point win over Alex.
Game 6 – Eric shot out into the lead early in cooperating with other players on scoring cards. In Turn 5, Rob bid a 13 power card with no caballeros in his court to snag a “score the firsts” card. He scored 5 areas while one of the others was tied for no score, to put him in first place by a single point. In the late turns he got a Decay of Authority followed by a “score the fives” which left Alex and Yoni behind. It was then between Rob and Eric, and the card selections and Castillo drop went in Rob’s favor, leading to a 3 point win.
Game 7 – Jay Fox got mostly shut out of early scoring. Tim opened up a sizable lead through two scoring cards in the middle of the game. At some point the 8/4/0 scoreboard was placed on the Castillo. There ended up being 35 caballeros in the Castillo for the final drop. Tim’s lead got slashed, but he stayed 3 points ahead of Alex at the end.
Both Rob and Yoni had two wins, but Yoni also had a 2nd and 3rd place whereas Rob finished last in his other games. Congratulations to Yoni!
One benefit of this game is that it is very quick for an online game, so the tournament went very fast. I may consider running this again next year as a “WBC warmup”.
epworthian 