Flashback Friday - Alhambra - Love It of Hate It?

I played this once or twice when it was new. So boring!

I think that I played Alhambra once back in the day, when a couple of my friends were all into the Eurogames. Those days are a bit of a blur, because all of those low-interaction games with drab themes tend to leave only trace memories.

Ha ha, I remember this was hard to get for a while- a SDJ winner in 2003 without an English edition or US publisher.

It’s a good game, it has that vintage Sackson/Randolph kind of feeling. Not sure if it was really SDJ material and in retrospect it seems like one of the lesser SDJ titles. Never played any of the expansions.

It's mildly entertaining. It's sort of like El Grande only in the sense that it has a big-box version and a lot of expansions but they're rarely if ever played, it seems like. It has a fun spatial and tile-orientation element and an interesting thing going on with the money, but it's like a lot of these games 20 or so years into the board game renaissance: it'd be perfectly fine to play, but there's also no particular reason to.

It was a big hit at the game club when it came out. For me, it was merely okay. I'd buy it for $5 at a garage sale, but I wouldn't pay full price for it.

Jeeze. I really like Alhambra. It's one of my favorite Euros, especially when played naked (i.e., no expansions). There's two or three different factors in every decision that are all in opposition with each other, it's relatively quick and easy to teach. For the genre I think this one hits on all 8.

The expansions just add glop to the mix, a bunch of additional options that take the edge off the game. Unfortunately the only way to buy it now is the "Big Box" version which means everyone is paying double what they should be.

This was an early Tanga buy for me. Remember Tanga? It's what everyone hated before there was Kickstarter.

Yo Sagrilarus, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:47 PM

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I paid $15.99 for this game. Those were the days.

Yeah, I don't get the hate. I've only ever played base Alhambra but it's perfectly fine. The currency system in it is pretty great, actually.

I found it to be boring and my wife HATED it. She found it to be too constrictive.

I can't say we still play it (the original version) BUT we'll bust out the dice game version for some easy to digest
YAHTZEE riffing fun.

To summarize this thread:

Alhambra in 2004: rate it a 10, even top ten.

Alhambra in 2019: a weak 7.

My partner got me this game as a present, an incident which made me start putting lists together. I didn't ask for this, it's boring, and the theme makes no sense, were my main thoughts.

Over the years I've come to appreciate it though. It's far from my favourite game but I'm happy enough to play it. It's a tight little system - exact money, playing for the majorities. I've looked at the expansions and most seem to dilute it, although with the kids we play with a "Vizier's purchase" house rule so once a game they can reserve a tile and save the despair, but that's as far as you'd want to go, I think.

Granada, with it's less set scoring has always interested me but I've got no desire to chase it up.

Tanga, where bad games went to die, LOL.