Stripped Down for Parts: Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492

 

 

Charles S. Roberts Award 2021 nominee: Best Early Gunpowder Board Wargame 1453-1793 AD 

I’ve had this nagging feeling for a while that I haven’t shown Compass Games as much love as I should, given the number of their title I own. I don’t know where this comes from; I’ve posted two reviews and seven unboxings of Compass titles – expect maybe that I have probably four or five more games that I haven’t got around to punching yet because I told myself, I really should post an unboxing of that one. One or two of these have been languishing for a year or more (sorry, Barbarians at the Gates (Compass Games, 2022), I’ll get to you soon). Today I’m starting to redress that situation.

Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492 (Compass Games, 2021), a game by noted designer, Jose Rivero, is a game about the Reconquista, the final push by rulers of Catholic Spain to retake the Moorish holdouts along the Iberian peninsula’s south-eastern coast. The game takes some mechanical cues from Sekigahara: the Unification of Japan (GMT Games, 2011), but in spite of the broadly shared theme of cultural homogenisation through conquest, it is definitely its own game.

If this was a movie, Omar Sheriff would be co-starring.

The box art, the work of Iván Cáceres, is reminiscent of nothing do much as an early 1960s epic movie poster. It’s very effective, I’d go so far as to say stirring, and lends a sense of the scale of the game. Basically, the cover on its own was enough to make me curious about the game.

Box back. Love the colour palette.

Turning to the box back, we get a (computer generated) idea of what the action on the board will look like. Personally, I think I’s rather just see a pic of the board and some cards and pieces (we get to see both here as well – the slight wrongness of the perspective with the pieces in relation to the board does my head in a little. But it’s not a deal-breaker.

The box-back information tells us that Granada is a two-player game of Medium complexity (somebody explained to me that it’s usually left to the designer to say how complex and how solitaire-friendly their game is), and Low solitaire suitability, which is fair, given we’re talking about a card-driven game with hidden information.

As is typical for Compass games, the Rulebook sports a facsimile of the cover art. The paper is a nice weight of low-gloss stock, a little shinier than a low-sheen, but not so you’ll be wrangling with serious glare trying to read the pages.

I’m still working through the rulebook, but so far it seems fairly straight forward and understandable. If you haven’t played a game like this before, it may present a slightly steeper learning curve, but the rulebook is full of illustrated examples of play, and while I haven’t looked yet, somebody must have done a play-though on YouTube by now.

Fully loaded: the contents of the box. I neglected to mention in this write-up;
the Christians and Muslims get their own drawstring bags  in which to
keep their blocks (and to randomly draw from for the arrival of reinforcements).

My only gripe with the rules is the size of the font. This isn’t really a valid complaint – I can read the Granada rules just fine if I’m wearing my prescription reading glasses (thanks again, old age), but even though I’ve been wearing the damn things for maybe ten years now, it’s still not yet an automatic thing to reach for my specs when I pick up a book or a magazine. Or, apparently, anything game-related. The font is a little small (about 6 point at an estimate, a similar sizer to the original Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1977) rulebooks), but given the rulebook comes to 28 pages as is, I can understand why the project director didn’t want to push it out to 32 pages to accommodate a larger print. But that just feels like looking for something to complain about.

The game board, incorporating the Turn Track and various holding boxes.

The game board is a map of the southern Iberian Peninsula, stretching from Gibraltar in the West to Cartagena in the east, and up to Ubeda in the North. Across the Mediterranean, Oran on the Barbary Coast makes an appearance. Point to point movement links towns and cities across the land, and the reconquered lands of the Catholic kings is differentiated in pale green from the diminishing extents of the remaining Muslim holdings, the subject of contention in this game.

I really like the map, but I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste – people get pernickety about maps. I think it manages to garner an impression of the maps of the period without slavishly aping the tropes. It’s clear and readable, and the muted colour palette really helps the stark black and white pieces pop on the board – there’s no chance of missing a unit here – and the locations aren’t so bunched up as to be impractical.

I haven’t checked this, but I suspect the game board is the work of Knut Grünitz, an artist with a long relationship with Compass Games, having contributed amazing work to tiles like Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games, 2015), The Conquistadors (2020), and the upcoming Manassas –Designer Signature Edition (Compass Games, ~2025), to name but a few.

Granada set-up card (in reality, in inner fold of the PAC)- quarter size of the game board..

The game comes not one, but two 11” X 17” set-up maps (inside the bi-fold PACs), which I for one really appreciate. It would be an easy thing to make this a two-page spread at the beginning of the rulebook, but Compass will often go the extra mile which this kind of thing. Thanks, Bill. Having two means if you have a buddy whose already familiar with the Granada set-up, you can each set up your own sides, giving you more time to actually play the game.

Players' Aid - Front and verso pages of the game layout.

Battle Reference Card - like it says on the label, this is a short precis of all the rules
affecting possible combat situations in the game. 

The back and front panels of the set-up charts are the designated Player’s Aids (again, duplicated, so you don’t need to be handing it over between turns). These offer A Yearly Cycle (each year consists of two turns, then a Reinforcement steep), table of Movement costs, Mustering and Land Movement on the front, and rules reminders for Overruns, Naval Movement and Victory conditions, as well as the Boabdil Mixed Army, which I am unfamiliar with but I’m sure we’ll learn all about it in play.

Victory Point Track. for the tracking of VPs, among other things.

The last card is labelled the Victory Point Track. It looks complicated at first glance, but it's actually quite elegant. Each player earns points for various successes (such as taking castles or vanquishing enemy units), but they do so at different rates. The lower part of the track helps to decode this inequity, making it a simpler job to track overall VP, and keep a tally of individual achievements.

Lots of blocks and bit, but don't despair - many don't need labelling.

When you get a copy of Granada, you’re going to be faced with the prospect of stickering up lots of wooden blocks. Don’t panic. It’s not all the blocks, and it’s just a single side. And there are only two sheets of stickers (with some duplicates for spares). I think I stickered mine up in less than ninety minutes, about a quarter of the time it took to sticker up the whole of Commands and Colors Tricorne: Jacobite Rising (Compass Games, 2020).

 

Stickers: Christian forces (top) and Muslim forces (above). I could not get a photo
of the stickers with my inadequate equipment to come out without too much glare
to make it worthwhile, so here are some copies Jose Rivero
posted on BoardgameGeek, just to give you the idea. 

The “blocks” themselves are an unusual mix. In most block games you’ll find just one size, or maybe a couple of sizes like in Commands and Colors games. In Granada you have a standard size of block for the units, then you have shallow discs labelled for tracking victory points, the current turn and such, and marking the presence of two Muslim leaders on the board. Then there are the Pioneer force (for use in sieges) and out-of-supply markers, labelled but in their natural pine colour, small cubes in black and white (haven’t got to these in the rules yet, so apologies), and really neat castle (square based) and watchtower (garrison markers, round base) blocks that stan upright on the board, complete with crenulations for that more authentic castle look. It’s a nice detail to add, and I can’t wait to see them on the board.

The block labels look great. They clear and easy to read. They’re a little on the glossy side for my taste but that’s no kind of legitimate criticism, merely an opinion. I can confirm that they adhere well, and so long as you don’t live in a super-dry environment (or, at the other extreme, a sauna), you shouldn’t have to take any special precautions looking after your stickered blocks.

The card decks, still in their cellophane wrappers; Car backs (top), and fronts (above);
Christian to the left, Muslim to the right.

The two sides come with their own sets of cards. None of the things that will make Granada an interesting game to play is the way combat works. The cards dictate which available forces you can bring to a fight; the others will, for whatever reason, sit it out. When an altercation is proposed, presumably the two sides will have certain forces available to them, but you can only bring to the battle the forces you can activate using the cards in your hand. Sometimes discretion will be the better part of valour. Or, to put it another way, Granada will likely be a game that rewards and punishes bold and reckless plays in equal measure.

The cards are transcendently attractive, illustrated in the style of the time, again by Mr Cáceres, who excels at this kind of work. There are four separate decks of cards in Granada; the Muslim and Christian decks for regular game operations, a naval deck for conflagrations at sea, and a Castle Surrender deck to deal with the results of successful sieges. The cards are printed on good stock, but you’ll probably want to sleeve a least the operational decks as I imagine you’ll probably cycle through these a time or two in a game.

Just one more thing... (Clarifications sheet).

A Compass game wouldn’t be a Compass game without errata, so the old saw goes. Well, that's a cheap shot, and not really fair; nearly every wargame, on release, has some hiccups with the rules. Poking the Bill the bear has become something of a sport with Compass and “errata” – I’ve been guilty of doing it myself – and but in all fairness, Compass has some of the best credentials of any game company in regard to this. If there are counter errors, the firm will mail out replacement counters to everyone who bought the game directly from the publisher, at the company's expense. And if typos slip past the catcher, or there is deemed to be some ambiguity in the rules that are found between the game getting printed and being sent out from the warehouse, Compass will incorporate a sheet of fixes, or in the case of Granada, Clarifications. People complain about this, but I’ve edited my share of public-facing documents in the past, so I know how easy it is for a mistake or two to make it into the release version, no matter how many times it’s proofed and checked. Compass does at lease as good a job at rectifying these as anyone else in the business, and to my mind a much better job than many.

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So, there you have it. My gaming program seems to be filling up for the foreseeable, but I’m very keen to get this to the table sometime sooner rather than later. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a review (or at least some AARs) before the end of the year. As always, thanks for reading this far.