Ravensburger The Quest for El Dorado Strategy Board Games for Adults and Kids Age 10 Years Up - 2 to 4 Players

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In other words, gather up resources to collect sets and score points OR play your markers onto the board to establish connections and race to earn points. There are enough ways to score points here (building a line that connects cities, placing enough markers in one district, placing a marker in all districts, collecting lots of resources and sets of resources) that you’ll always have a decent strategy to work toward. Whether that strategy pans out or not is going to heavily depend on how the tiles are revealed and how tempting those tiles are to your opponents. Rivers, Lakes, and a Water Vortex massively ups the water spaces of your map, putting a greater emphasis on paddle cards. But more than that, the rivers and vortex feature arrows that push your explorer one space further if you complete a card’s movement on them. So traveling along these spaces feels a lot like the moving walkways at the airport where you are moving faster and further than the steps you are taking. It’s quite fun to string together a 4 space movement with a couple single paddle cards. El Dorado straddles the line between an approachable family game and an enjoyable game night game with ease. It is simple enough for younger players but with enough options to keep hardened gamers involved!

It plays equally well at two as it does four. The Quest for El Dorado also works well for experienced gamers and those relatively new to the hobby too. If the rules were a bit more friendly this could easily be an entry level game, if it appeals a how to play video may make it accessible. To move onto a rubble or base camp space, use any cards from your hand. The number of symbols on the space indicates the number of cards you need to play. The identity of those cards is irrelevant. Now some people might gripe at the size of the cards. They could be bigger but it doesn’t bother me. Art is subjective, but for me the artwork is fine albeit perhaps a little dated. The cards do the job, with clear iconography but I understand some might want something a little more exciting to look at. The Indiana Jones meeples are fun though. Although I’m a major Knizia fan, this big box game has been living in the shadows of his other more successful or more interesting releases during that same time period including 2018’s Blue Lagoon and Yellow & Yangtze, 2019’s Babylonia and Tajuto, and 2020’s My City, among others. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do enough to justify its escape from the shadows of those giants. On top of that, I’m not a huge fan of the art style for Aristocracy which makes it look like a 15-year-old game rather than a 3-year-old game.As an aside, I think the rules questions in our first game were a bit of an oddity (love you, Steve). The game is more complex than the original, but not by much, and wouldn’t hardly be at all without the gold. However, the rulebook could use some improvement. While it is usually clear with parenthetical remarks about a ruling, it would be better if they had more distinct language between, for example, a single card used for movement and the overall “Movement” phase. Also, Guardians are referenced in the rulebook before they are even introduced, which was jarring. When moving on your turn, for each card you play, choose which playing piece that card applies to. Move that playing piece, then choose again for your next card. Once everybody passes, the display of new dominos is awarded out where the highest bidder gets the best tile, the second highest bidder gets the second best domino, and so on. But if you pass during a round and don’t have a worm among your played cards, then you immediately have to take the worst tile in the display and you don’t get to steal from another player (even if your played sum equals their displayed domino).

So why wait? Join the search for El Dorado today and experience the thrill of the hunt in this exciting and engaging board game. Since I brought up Guardians, let’s talk about them. The original El Dorado had a “Caves” variant, where the impassable Mountain spaces became Caves where players could explore to get upgrade tokens. This is a super fun variant that I always use. In The Golden Temples, these have become Caverns, and are now punishments… sort of. Most of the Cavern tokens, along with one of the new barricades, require you to give everyone else something positive. I don’t mind this at all — yes, it’s a punishment, but it makes players around the table happy, no one in particular gets sad, and it speeds up the game. However, one of the Caverns is a punishment, forcing a player to lose all of their gold. It can extremely brutal, particularly for an unsuspecting player who forgot that was a possibility even though I said so at the beginning and only ever saw the other types of tiles flipped, and then lost 4 gold.* (Love you, Steve.) It seems far too out of place for only one of the Caverns to act this way; since there are more than needed, I’ll be removing it, much like the Mandatory Quest in Lords of Waterdeep. I might even simply use the awesome Cave tokens from El Dorado, since I still own the game and intend to combine both in one box (they fit with room to spare). As I wrote in my 2019 article, announcements like this one can be frustrating since you don't necessarily want to buy a game a second time or feel like you're forced to buy in to increase the chances of the expansions being released. That said, I can understand Ravensburger's hesitancy to charge ahead with the expansions at the same time as the base game. Indeed, as I noted three years ago, Ravensburger initially had no plans to release expansions for the game, primarily because it just wasn't a company that released expansions (outside of its alea brand). I would not have anticipated this development, however, so I'm curious to see what will come next. If there is at least one vacant spot on the market board, you may choose any expedition card that you can afford, even if they aren't on the market board. If the chosen card is from one of the piles next to the market board, place its pile on the vacant spot.The challenge takes place over 12 rounds of players selecting any number of dice from their hidden supply to roll and attempting to roll the highest sum with the winner claiming all of the dice that were invested in rolls that round. The player with the most dice at the end wins. The catch is that you must accomplish this without exploding. The lust for gold spans all eras, races, and nationalities. To possess any amount of gold seems to ignite an insatiable desire to obtain more.