El Gaucho - Argentum Verlag

The night started with me going downstairs to get a game we haven't played before.  It was early enough to learn something new.  I came back with several including El Gaucho.  We sat down and went through the rules, most of which were easy to understand.  Only being confused by a Spanish word for pasture.

In the game you are a owner of a cattle farm and you hire gaucho's to bring the best cattle back to you so you can sell them.  Their are several breeds of cattle with numbers from 1-12 on them.  To score you want to form ascending or descending rows of cattle.  When you round up a cow that has a number that can't fit on the end of your row you need to sell the row (herd) and start a new herd.  You score by number of cattle in the heard times the largest numbered cow in the herd.  So if you have 5 cattle numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 then each cow would be worth 10, and you would score 50 points.

And you collect the cows by rolling dice (training your gaucho's) and you use the dice to pick which cattle you can get or other activities that the gaucho's can do.  Including stealing an opponents cow, or getting an extra die.

While the theme seems lighthearted and almost silly, the game had lots of interesting decisions you had to make, as to which cow to select or activity to have your gaucho preform in order to get the most points.

I enjoyed this game very much with it's fun art and theme to the interesting and thoughtful game play that forced you to think about every move in order to better your herds.

Players:
John Stout
Angela Stout

Pros:
Colorful fun art.  Tiles felt durable with nice wooden pieces.  Neat dice corral.  Fun game play.

Cons:
Nothing yet.  It may change on more plays though.

Play Again?:
I definitely would want to play this again.  I would also like to try it with multiple players.

El Gaucho by Argentum Verlag

Designer - Arve D. Fühler