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

£22.495
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Ravensburger The Quest for El Dorado Strategy Board Games for Adults and Kids Age 10 Years Up - 2 to 4 Players

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

RRP: £44.99
Price: £22.495
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Description

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. When one player commits big to a row, all hope is not lost for the others. A small subset of your card supply will let you play a dragon to swallow up (and replace) an opponent card, another will erase the values of all cards in a row and transform the competition into most cards played, and another will ramp up in value as you play more of that type. Where your special cards are rare, it’s best to be cautious as you decide where and when to commit them. Katrin Seemann, PR Manager at Ravensburger Verlag, has confirmed that the company will release a new version of The Quest for El Dorado base game in January 2023 with the Vincent Dutrait artwork and graphic design. Says Seemann, "Of course we are also planning extensions, but we first have to wait and see how the relaunch is received. The first expansion would then be Heroes & Hexes and the second one Dangers & Muisca. But there are no concrete launch dates for the expansions yet." This new Ravensburger edition will feature larger cards than the original base game to match the 999 Games production.

We have many ideas", continues Knizia. "They are in development, and it depends on individual publishers what we will do with them. For some publishers, it's important to have ideas of expansions, and others focus solely on the base game. The publishers will decide what they want to do. I will build the world, then the publishers can take one thing or another from it." Despite all of that, The Quest for El Dorado has been an irresistible design that Dr. Knizia just can’t leave alone. Yet if there is any game in his entire ludography that lends itself best to expansion content, it undoubtedly has to be this one. This game features all the key ingredients for expansion content:It’s unclear whether No Mercy or Hit! will become easily available for folks in North America, as it does not have English rules in the box (although you can find a fan translation on Board Game Geek). That’s a bit of a shame, because I find myself preferring No Mercy over Family Inc. (although who knows… it’s possible that Cheeky Monkey is the best of the bunch). Designed for 2-4 players and suitable for ages 10 and up, The Quest for El Dorado is a game that's easy to learn but challenging to master. With stunning artwork and high-quality components, it's a game that's as visually appealing as it is fun to play.

The legend of El Dorado endures because "you want it to be true," says Jose Oliver, a lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. "I don't think we've ever stopped seeking El Dorado." The Spaniards started calling this golden chief El Dorado, "the gilded one." The ceremony of the gilded man supposedly ended in the late 15th century when El Dorado and his subjects were conquered by another tribe. But the Spaniards and other Europeans had found so much gold among the natives along the continent's northern coast that they believed there had to be a place of great wealth somewhere in the interior. The Spaniards didn't find El Dorado, but they did find Lake Guatavita and tried to drain it in 1545. They lowered its level enough to find hundreds of pieces of gold along the lake's edge. But the presumed fabulous treasure in the deeper water was beyond their reach. Raleigh's Quest

The Bottom Line

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. As for what follows after that, it largely depends on the market — by which I mean "markets", specifically the seventeen language-based markets that currently exist or will exist within the next twelve months for The Quest for El Dorado. People might be frustrated that the new Dutrait version of the game won't be sold in their country or their language, but keep in mind that the Heroes & Hexes expansion from Ravensburger currently exists solely in a dual English/German edition. Perhaps French, Spanish, and Italian versions will exist in the future, and perhaps not. I’ll tell you what gives: Muisca cards are bankable cards. When you draw one into your hand, you can either play and discard it like normal or you can set it aside and save it for a future turn (where it doesn’t take up space in your hand). This allows you to call upon a stored Muisca card at precisely the moment when you need it most, rather than hope to draw it into your hand on the right turn. Players are allowed to store 2 Muisca cards at a time, and these cards add yet another layer of strategy to the experience.

You cannot use a card for both of your playing pieces by splitting up its power. Additionally, all playing pieces still function as barriers - you can't move onto a space that is already occupied by another playing piece - even if it is yours. Knizia emphasizes that Ravensburger is perfectly within its rights not to license its art for whatever reasons it wants, but this decision made things difficult for his licensing efforts given that Ravensburger was already covering the largest markets — North America and much of Europe — on its own. "For smaller publishers with smaller markets, they might have a harder time paying for new art and graphics given how much is needed for this game," he says. 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. In a tweet on July 9, Knizia had stated that the game would appear in eleven languages not covered by Ravensburger, but following the publicity of his original announcement, a twelfth language edition has been signed. Those languages are Dutch (from 999 Games); Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish (from Lautapelit.fi); and (from publishers still to be announced) Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian. (The Lautapelit.fi edition will include components and rules in English, but it cannot be sold by the publisher outside of Finland and Scandinavia.) When a player reaches one of the 3 finishing spaces, this triggers the final round (they will then place their playing piece on El Dorado to free up the finishing space). Each player left in that round will now play their final turn. Once the round is completed, the game is over.

Key Facts

In The Quest for El Dorado, players will take on roles of expedition leaders searching for the land of gold located in the jungles of South America. Each player will need to assemble and equip their team with just one goal in mind, reach the golden boarder first. The player with the best tactics will be rewarded as winner of the game! Game Components But regardless of who you move or where they land, the moved explorer always gets placed on the dark side of the space they occupy. This means they cannot be moved again… unless you roll a 2. A 2 lets you move any explorer 2 spaces (even one that is currently in darkness), and there are 2 faces of the die can give you this result. Deep in the dense jungles of South America lies El Dorado, the city of gold. Unlimited treasure waits in this lost kingdom - gold, jewels, and precious artifacts. You are a group of daring adventurers who embark on a search for the lost city. You know what’s surprising? According to Board Game Geek, there is only one game in existence that goes by the title “ Great Wall of China.” You know what’s less surprising? It’s designed by Reiner Knizia 😆. The first challenge is to find a publisher interested in the game," says Knizia. "Ideally that would be a publisher who is willing and able to take the game and market it to its largest potential worldwide. No publisher can do that by themselves, but many publishers have built up networks that extend their reach. I would like to work with a publisher who can do that because I'd give the game to one publisher, deal only with them, then everyone would work from the same template, which leads to bigger co-publications, which is more cost effective."

There’s plenty of tactical nuance here that I’m impressed and engaged during play. I’m just not sure that Great Wall of China does quite enough to stand out from the Samurai & Condottiere crowd. Most critically, it’s not quite fast enough to justify playing this over more meaty strategic games that also play in under an hour.

Treasures of Nakbe streamlines and simplifies the strategy of Winner’s Circle by simply dealing one secret card to each player that displays the three explorers they are invested in. The goal is to help those explorers race to stay ahead of the competition as they run from the dreaded guardian who ever closes in on them. With no bets being made and no probabilities to analyze, this game offers a much more family-friendly experience while still keeping things interesting with the game board interactions along the way. All the cards in the market are good, but your starting cards are quite weak. It can therefore be worth discarding those as the game progresses. This ensures that they don’t bury the good cards in your hand. There are also times where cards become superfluous to requirements. That is to say, you might have some water cards in your hand, but no spaces to use them on. In these instances you need to try and get rid. This refinement can be vital in winning or losing a close game. It is also why buying a single use card isn’t always a bad thing! Looking for an exciting adventure game that will keep you on the edge of your seat? Look no further than The Quest for El Dorado board game! The final Mandoo x Knizia collaboration is yet another design with a storied past. This one is a reimplimentation of Ravensburger’s Drachenhort (2015). Notably, Ravensburger never brought this title to North America despite it being a solid family game. But I suppose that doesn’t matter any more, because Treasures of Nakbe (1) does include English rules, (2) will hopefully make its way to the US, and (3) features some interesting new twists to the gameplay. Since the game's debut in 2017, Ravensburger has released versions of The Quest for El Dorado in German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian — and that was it as far as the company was concerned. Says Knizia, "Ravensburger did not want to cover the other territories, which meant that I had all the other territories to cover myself. This game is too close to my heart, and if they didn't want to cover it, then I wanted to do it myself."



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