Hello! Let me begin with a bit of an introduction. I was born in New York City, and both my parents were Puerto Rican. As a result, I grew up with Spanish as my first language and we lived in a Spanish speaking neighbourhood, so everyone I saw spoke Spanish. That is, until I started first grade and then I heard my first words in English. I quickly caught on, but my parents decided that I should stop speaking Spanish at home and only speak English. To be honest, I think my mother wanted to improve her English, so it was really for her benefit rather than mine.
I have never taken a Spanish class, nor have I ever written anything in Spanish (although I have often made presentations in Spanish) but I frequently speak Spanish to my friends around the world. So, when Zatu suggested the idea of a board game blog written in a foreign language (or more correctly, not in English), I decided to take the challenge.
The choice of topic was easy – the best games about Spain. A quick glance at BGG showed that there were 525 games to choose from, so I thought putting together this list would be easy. But taking a closer look, I realized that this was going to be more difficult than I thought. For example, I grew up playing Monopoly with the two most expensive streets being Boardwalk and Park Place, but I now live in England where the equivalent streets are Mayfair and Park Lane. Did you know that there are two versions of Monopoly in Spain? The first is the Madrid edition where the Paseo del Prado and Paseo de la Castellana are the two most expensive properties. The other one is the Barcelona (Catalan) edition where Passeig de Gràcia and Avinguda Diagonal are the most expensive streets. That might be an interesting bit of trivia for non-Spaniards, but I wouldn’t consider Monopoly a game about Spain. It just happens to have Spanish names on the board, but BGG considers the Spanish editions as a game about Spain.
Similarly, Ticket to Ride: Europe is a great family game played on a board with a map of Europe. There in the lower left is the Iberian peninsula with the four great cities of Spain – Madrid, Barcelona, Pamplona (?!) and Cadiz (?!). Now in real life, Madrid (population 2.8 million) and Barcelona (1.45 million) are indeed the biggest cities of Spain. But Pamplona is way down the list at number 35 (163,000), and Cadiz is lower still at 42 (141,000). Alan R Moon (the designer of all 44 of the Ticket to Ride games) should have chosen Bilbao (#8 with 350,000) instead of Pamplona, and Málaga (#6 with 542,000) instead of Cadiz. These towns are in very similar locations, and they are much larger than the original selections.
But these are very minor points; there is more about the geography in Ticket to Ride: Europe that bothers me. Every schoolboy knows that Madrid is in the centre of Spain, but the map designers placed Madrid southwest of Toledo, and its placement in the game just looks wrong to anyone familiar with a map of Spain. But the greatest mistake that the designer made in his map of Spain is that he placed Barcelona where Valencia is located! If you don’t believe me, here is a map of Spain.
The black circles are where (in the game) the four cities are marked. They are also labelled in red, so that you can see which is which. See what I meant about Barcelona and Valencia?! And Valencia is the third biggest city in Spain with 736,000 inhabitants! But geography errors aside, I couldn’t consider Ticket to Ride: Europe, simply because the Spain is a small part of the map; it’s a map which includes England, Turkey and part of Russia.
But enough of the games that didn’t make the list. Let’s start with the best of the best.
Best Game About Spain: El Grande
When I first thought about the games that would be on this list, I already knew that this one was going to be the winner. It is one of my favourite games and the fact that it was released way back in 1995 and is still popular with gamers today qualifies El Grande as a true classic, and a worthy winner. However, I have to admit that the game has not been continuously available for all that time. The previous release was a Spanish one in 2012 and the latest release by Hans im Glück was in 2023. In between those two periods, you were also able to buy a big box version of the game (which included the original game plus six expansions), but that makes the game too expensive for an entry level purchaser. Nonetheless, I am expecting (hoping for) the announcement of a 30 year anniversary edition at some point next year.
The board is a map of Spain divided into 9 regions – Galicia, Pais Vasco, Aragon, Castilla la Vieja, Castilla la Nueva, Sevilla, Granada, Valencia, and Cataluña. The essence of the game is that you are taking turns placing cubes into those various regions. In my edition of the game, you are actually placing cubes – the small ones are called caballeros and the large one is called the grande. But in the latest edition of the game, the caballeros are meeples and the grande is a meeple riding a horse.
Regardless of the shape (be it a cube or a meeple), when you put down a caballero or a grande in a region, it does feel as though you are sending an army to a region. Each region scores a different amount (for first, second and third), so you have to decide whether it’s worth adding cubes to have the most caballeros in a particular region, or go for second (and/or third) place in other regions.
But you don’t score after every round. You only score after the third, sixth and ninth rounds. You then add up all those scores for each player, and the one with the highest number of points becomes El Grande (the winner).
But there is more to the game than just placing the cubes. At the start of the game, you each have a deck of cards numbered 1 to 13, and on each of those cards there is an indication of how many caballeros you can place on your turn. The higher the number on the card, the fewer the caballeros you can place. So when the starting player reveals his number, everyone after him must play a card with a different number. And once you have played a card, you cannot use it again.
You might think that it would be advantageous to choose a low number to be able to place more caballeros on the board, but there is an additional deck of action cards on the table that allow you to move caballeros from one region to another, move the king, move another player’s caballeros, score a particular region now, etc. But only a few of these cards are available during the round, so you might want to play a high number to be able to choose one of these action cards (they also allow you to place caballeros). The player who played the lowest number goes last so there probably won’t be an action card available, but he is the starting player in the next round.
The game plays between two and five (it’s better with more players) and it takes between one and two hours to play. But I have yet to mention one of the best features of the game – the Castillo. Instead of placing a caballero in a region, you can choose to put your caballero in the Castillo. In my edition of the game, the Castillo is just four interlocking wooden panels that form a brown tube, but in the latest edition, the panels are made of cardboard and they have been decorated to look like a castle. There is even a gate that can be lifted to release all the meeples in the Castillo.
So, until the scoring round, no one has any idea how many meeples there are in the Castillo. You could probably remember how many caballeros you put in, but were you counting how many everyone else was putting in? The player with the most caballeros in the Castillo gets 5 points, second place gets 3 points, and third place gets 1 point. But the really fun part is that just before the caballeros are released from the Castillo, each player secretly chooses to what region they are going to send their caballeros after the counting.
The Castillo is the first region to score, so when you send your caballeros en mass to a particular region, you are bolstering the numbers there immediately before they are scored. This is a deliciously tense moment that makes El Grande a winner. It can look like you’ve completely ignored the highest scoring region, and then after the Castillo, you suddenly added six caballeros to that region and now you have the majority. But the current leader might have anticipated your move, and sent his caballeros to that region. But you were actually interested in another region and sent all your caballeros there, so the reinforcements were unnecessary. But the current leader thought that might be the case, so he sent his caballeros to a region that you were interested in, and now he has the majority in two regions.
Best Cooperative Game About Spain: Pandemic Iberia
If El Grande (1995) is a classic from the 20th century, then Pandemic [8] (2008) is a classic from the 21st century. In the same way that gamers site El Grande as the best area control game, you would also have them say that Pandemic is the best co-operative game (or at least, set the standard by which all other cooperative games are measured). The reason that I hesitate is that there are about twelve versions of Pandemic and the highest ranked one on BGG is Pandemic Legacy Season 1 [9]. In that legacy version of the game, you are going to be playing the game at least 12 times (each game representing a month of time), and every time you win, you go on to the next month/game. If you fail in January, then you have to play January again. But if you fail the second time, you can move on to February. So, you may have to play the game as much as 24 times before you finish the campaign. But at the end, you will be left with your own unique Pandemic game. That happens because as the game progresses, you are putting stickers on the board, the rulebook, component boxes, character sheets, city cards, etc. The process of playing a game that changes as you play it over and over again gives Pandemic Legacy a cinematic feel, and it’s more like you are playing a role playing game than a board game.
In the original Pandemic, the board is a map of the world, and players are moving around the world trying to cure 4 diseases (named simply blue, yellow, black and red). Most of the time when you travel, you are flying from one city to another. In Pandemic Iberia, you are moving around the Iberian peninsula trying to gather information about four diseases. In order to limit the players to that region, Matt Leacock (the designer of original Pandemic) and Jesús Torres Castro (the co-designer of Pandemic Iberia) eliminated the possibility of air travel by setting the game in the middle of the 19th century. In Pandemic Iberia, the designers also gave the diseases names – black was malaria, blue was cholera, red was typhus and yellow was yellow fever. Technically, these names only appear on the optional cards intended to make the game more difficult. For example, when an area becomes infected, you normally just add a cube of the corresponding colour to city on the map. According to the rulebook, if you want to take the “historical disease challenge” for Malaria, when infecting with a black cube, if the city has no black cubes in it, place two cubes.
Let’s take a step back. At the start of the game, you have a map of the Iberian peninsula with 48 cities marked with coloured dots. The ones with blue dots are in the west, the red dots are in the north, the black dots are in the south, and the yellow dots are in the east. You also have an infection deck with 48 matching city cards. To begin the game, you shuffled this deck and deal 3 cards face up. You now place 3 cubes of matching colours on the cities you just dealt. Do it again and place 2 cubes on the cities. Do it one last time and place 1 cube on the cities. These 18 cubes represent the initial infection level of the peninsula. There are over 1.78 billion starting positions, so it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll ever repeat the same starting position twice.
The players have their own deck which replicates the 48 cities, but it also contains some event cards and some epidemic cards. The key to winning is to use these cards and your player actions to build a hospital, ensure a supply of clean water, build railroads (to speed up travel between cities), and treat each of the diseases. When you have built a hospital in a city, if you can discard five cards matching the colour of the hospital (city), you have researched that disease, and you can cross it off the list and move on to trying to research the other three. However, if you ever run out of disease cubes or player cards (or have a massive panic), you lose.
Iberia plays 2 to 5 players (some gamers also enjoy playing this as a solo game), and it pretty much plays well at all those player counts. A typical game will last about 45 minutes. And to add to the variety mentioned above, each player also has a special power, which you choose at the beginning of the game. There are seven roles to choose from (no duplicates allowed):
· Railwayman – Can build railways more efficiently (place two railway tokens instead of one) or can move another player (in the same city) with him when he moves by train.
· Agronomist – Can purify water more efficiently (place two purification tokens instead of one), which helps to slow down the disease.
· Politician – Can retrieve discarded city cards and give a city card to another player, aiding in research and coordination.
· Nurse – Prevents disease cubes from being added to her city during infections.
· Rural Doctor – Can treat diseases more effectively (remove two disease cubes instead of one).
· Sailor – Can travel freely between port cities, or move another player (in the same city) with him when he travels by ship.
· Royal Academy Scientist – Can purify water more efficiently or can spend an action to look at the next three cards in the player deck (and can even rearrange them).
You can assign these roles at random, or players can choose a role whose power appeals to them.
The rulebooks for El Grande and Iberia are both about twelve pages long, and they are very easy to follow. In my preceding description of these games, I didn’t cover all the rules, but hopefully, I’ve given you enough information to let you know whether or not you would enjoy playing these excellent games. The only thing that these two games have in common is that they are played on a map of the Iberian peninsula with cubes. In El Grande (based in the 15th century), the cubes belong to a player and the idea is to place them to score the most points, and the country of Portugal is relegated to being an area in which to place the round tracker and scoring order. In Iberia (based in the mid-19th century), the cubes are diseases, and the idea is to keep them under control until you can research them. Portugal is obviously part of the game (that is why it’s not called Pandemic Spain).
That’s enough for now. Come back soon for the next part.
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The Best Games About Spain (Part 2)
I don’t want you to think that I only considered games played on a map of Spain. The next game on the list barely qualifies as a game about Spain, but I include it because it looks great on the table, it’s easy to play, it’s highly rated on BGG and it involves a lot of dice rolling.
Only In Name: Sagrada
If you look at the front of the box, there is an image of a stained glass window. In the middle of that window is an image (in stained glass) of a church, and it’s clearly the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. That is obviously what the Sagrada in the title is referring to, and that’s where the connection to Spain ends. But wait, this game is a lot of fun to play (if you don’t mind the randomness of rolling dice).
To begin with each player is given a beautiful Window frame (a gothic arch shaped card) with a gorgeous stained glass window occupying the top two-thirds of the frame, and a 5 x 4 grid at the bottom. You are also given two double sided pattern cards (one side is easier than the other). You choose one of these four sides and insert it into the window frame, discarding the other one. Because of the pattern cards, some of the 20 squares in your window frame will be marked. For example, some squares will be marked with a colour indicating that you have to put a die of that colour there or some will be marked with a number indicating that you have to put a die with that number there.
Note that each of these pattern cards is marked with a difficulty level, and having chosen a level, you are given a corresponding number of favour tokens. The easiest level gives you three tokens and the hardest six. These tokens can be used to buy tools (which allow you to manipulate the dice in your frame), but they are also worth victory points if you don’t use them.
The essence of the game (which is played with 90 multicolour dice [18 dice in 5 colours]) is that you are going to be placing dice into your 4×5 grid to score as many points as possible. To aid you in maximizing your score, there are three types of cards
· Private Objective Cards. At the start of the game, you are given a card that tells you which colour scores for you. So, you might score the sum of all the pips displayed on the green dice in your frame, and someone else will score for all the blue dice in their frame. Generally, the colour of the card dealt to you is kept a secret.
· Public Objective Cards. Three cards are dealt face on the table at the beginning of the game. These cards tell you the bonus point conditions. For example, for every row of dice in your frame that contains all five colours you get six points.
· Tool Cards. Three cards are dealt face up in a row at the beginning of the game. They allow you to manipulate the dice in your frame. The first person to use a specific tool card only pays one favour token. The second one pays two, the third three, etc.
On your turn, you reach into a bag and take out 2xN+1 dice (where N is the number of players), so you would take out 9 dice in a 4 player game. Obviously, these will vary in colour, but don’t worry about the numbers as you re-roll all the dice. As the starting player, you choose a die, then the player to your left chooses one, then the player to their left chooses one, etc. The last player then takes a second dice, and then the player to his right takes a die, then the player to his right takes a die, etc. At the end of this procedure, everyone has taken two dice.
As soon as you choose a die, it has to be placed in your window frame. The very first die has to be placed around the outside of the frame (ie, you cannot place it in the six innermost squares). The next die you pick has to be placed touching the die already in your frame, but they cannot match its colour or value. So, you can’t put a red die touching the face of a red die, or a die with six on top touching the face of another die with six on top. But if you took a red six and the only die in your frame is a red six, you can place that die in your frame so that only the corner edges were touching. That is, the first red six would have to have been placed in the outer cells of the frame, but the second red six could be placed in the inner cells so that the dice were only touching on an edge (and not a face). In other words, if the dice touch faces, the colour and number have to be different, but if they only touch at the corners, they can be the same number and/of colour. To anyone watching a player take this action, it can only mean that they are scoring the red dice. In other words, although the colour you score with is a secret, you very soon know who is going after what colours.
The game builds up in intensity. At the beginning, the selected dice can be placed virtually anywhere, but as your frame fills with dice, your options are getting smaller and smaller. You go from needing a die that is not red to die that is blue to a blue three. And I cannot tell you the joy that players have when they need a specific number, roll a die (using a tool) and get it.
Sagrada is all about rolling dice, and because of that there is a big luck factor. But there is also a fair amount of strategy. Sagrada plays 1 to 4 players in about 30 to 45 minutes, but there is also an expansion that allows you to play up to six players. That expansion includes two more window frames, more dice, more cards and more tokens, but there is also something called the private dice pool (which is a round piece of cardboard decorated to look like a stained glass window with cutouts for 10 dice). This component adds a new way to play the game, and it makes it much better. At the beginning of the game, each player takes two dice in each of the five colours, rolls them and places them in cutouts in their private dice pool. So straight away, you have 10 dice with known colours and values to choose from. Now you start the game, but instead of taking out 2xN+1 dice, you only take N+1 dice. This really changes the game for the better, and I highly recommend that you get the expansion for that reason, even if you never have more than four players.
While Sagrada barely touches Spain, the next game on my list lives and breathes in Catalonia (and the other parts of Spain that partake in this tradition), even though the game was designed by an American living in Berlin (Aaron Vanderbeek). The theme transports you to the world of those amazing human towers (Castells) that were recognized by UNESCO in 2010 as an intangible cultural heritage.
A Catalan Tradition – Castell
The goal of the game is to build the highest Castell, and collect the most victory points. To aid you in your quest, there are 150 casteller tokens (numbered between 1 and 10) which you can collect and assemble into castells. The tokens vary in size – with 1 and 2 being the smallest, and 9 and 10 being the biggest. They are assembled into castells according to three basic rules
· All the castellers in a row have to have the same value.
· A row of castellers on top of a previous row must have a lower value than the row underneath, and consist of fewer castellers.
· The most castellers you can have in a row is three.
At the start of the game, you are given 7 castellers at random, and if you tried to assemble them into a castell, the best that you could achieve is a pyramid of six – 1 at the top, 2 underneath, and 3 at the bottom. But the game allows you to develop the skills of your team (colla) so that you can make your colla more diverse, wider and taller.
There are five skills that you can master, and each of those skills can go from level 0 to level 5 (with the number of the skill level indicating to how many times you can apply the skill to your castell). The skills are
· Balance. A row can have the same number of castellers as the row beneath it.
· Base. You can put as many castellers as you want into one row.
· Mix. You can have one row of mixed sizes (eg, 9 and 10, 7 and 8, 5 and 6, etc)
· Strength. You can have one row supporting castellers of the same value.
· Width. You can increase the width of the entire castell by one casteller.
Your castell can be disassembled and reassembled as many times as you want, and as your skill levels change (and local performance opportunities arise), you will discover more possibilities to make your colla taller and/or wider.
The board has four main areas. The largest area is occupied by a map of the Catalonian coast (from Tarragona to Mataro). Seven locations are marked on the map and each of these locations offers you the opportunity to recruit a casteller. The exact number of castellers in each location depends on the number of players. You can only recruit castellers in the location that you are in. So, if you want to recruit a casteller in another location, you first have to move there.
The lower right corner of the board is where the Skill Wheel is located. Around the outside are eight segments that are randomly placed at the start of the game, with most of the segments corresponding to one of the skills mentioned above. The balance skill is duplicated (so that explains six of the segments). The seventh segment is Practice, which allows you to increase any of your skill levels by 1 level [but not from 0 to 1]. The eighth segment is Special, which allows you to take a special action without using up a token (more about that shortly).
Inside these segments, there is a double sided wheel that spins freely. This wheel is divided into eight segments, with seven of those segments corresponding to one of the locations in the game. The eighth segment says “All Regions” [meaning anyone can use the skill on the corresponding segment] on one side and “No Region” [meaning no one can use that skill segment in this round] on the other. Obviously, the second side is intended for more advanced players.
Let’s assume that Mataro is opposite the Strength skill. Then anyone who is in Mataro can train to increase their Strength skill by one level. After everyone has had a turn, the skill wheel is rotated one segment clockwise (so it never really spins), and the skill for Mataro changes as it is now opposite a different skill segment. The game is played in 10 rounds, so you know ahead of time which locations will have which skill in which round.
The third section of the board displays local performances. These are basically tokens that give you bonus points if you can construct the castell which is illustrated on it. For example, a 1-2-2-3-4 castell gives you 3 victory points. Two local performance tokens are assigned to each location at the start of the game. Some of these can be very complicated, and those will give you double digit victory points. To claim one of these, you usually place a special action token in the local performance area, demonstrate that you can replicate the castell, and take the token. But in order to do all that, you also have to be located in that location.
The fourth section of the board is the event calendar. After the third round, at least one location will have a festival and all the castellers in that location can compete for a prize (victory points which depend on how many compete). The locations that will be hosting these festivals are randomly assigned at the beginning of the game, and they all have entry requirements (again randomly assigned at the beginning of the game). For example, to compete in the festival at Barcelona, your castell must have a casteller of value 7. But these numbers are more than just an entry condition; they also affect the value of your castell. So, if you have a castell that is 5 layers high, you score 5 points, but then we add one point for every casteller of value 7 in your castell. So, the height and the composition of your castell matter. The festival competitions are always at the end of a round, so you can start in another location, give a local performance, and then move to Barcelona to compete in the festival. These festival competitions are important because the final score for your castell is the highest number of points that your castell scored in all the competitions (not the accumulated total, just the highest single competition total).
These festival competitions are lots of fun because you’re looking across the table to see what the other colles in your location look like, and whether they can meet the entry conditions. For example, you and Pedro are in Barcelona, and Pedro has a much higher castell than you, but he doesn’t have a 7 in his castell. But there is a 7 casteller available in Barcelona! Will you stop Pedro from getting that casteller (taking it for your castell), or will you use your turn to improve your skills and then rearrange your castell to make it more valuable? Or maybe you will move to an adjacent location and give a local performance and take the token for 11 victory points. Or maybe you can move to another location where you stand a better chance of winning (or get more victory points because there are more colles competing).
On your turn, you can take any (or all) of the following actions, but you can only do them once.
· Move. You can move your pawn from one location to an adjacent one.
· Recruit. You can take up to two castellers from your current location.
· Train. Look at the skill wheel and increase the corresponding skill level
· Special Action. Use one of your special action tokens to recruit 1 casteller, move your pawn, or give a local performance.
At the start of the game, each player is given 7 special action tokens. These allow you to take the special action moves.
This is a very thematic game, and all the actions seem very logical. I also love the artwork. When two castellers are next to one another, the outline of a third casteller is revealed. This really adds to the theme of building a castell. It plays 2 – 4 in about 60 – 90 minutes, but your first game of Castell will probably take you about two hours. The game isn’t very difficult, and the rules are very straightforward, but this game is a real brain burner. You will be thinking about what you should do, where should you go, how many points you can score, which skill should I develop first, etc.
This game is ranked 1457 (compared to El Grande at 100), but it really surprises me that it’s so far down the list. Maybe the theme doesn’t excite people as much as it does me. Or maybe people feel that two hours to play a game is a huge sacrifice. If you have fellow gamers who suffer from analysis paralysis, this is definitely a game that could paralyze them, and turn this into an unenjoyable three hour game.
That’s enough for now. Come back soon for the next part.
