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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With Family Inc., you only steal from other players’ queued stashes when you conclude your turn without busting. With No Mercy, you must decide to steal mid-turn, the moment you reveal a matching card, and sometimes it’s better to not steal from others if you wish to draw a second or third card without the chance of busting.

Every player gets one turn to roll their dice, exploded dice end up in the middle, and the highest roll that did not explode takes all of the dice that were rolled (whether they exploded or not). 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 😆. If you have "leftover" power, you may use it to continue moving to the next space. The same 2 requirements apply, but you first subtract the power you already spent from the played card's power value. 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). 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.Aside from Wettlauf nach El Dorado, I have minimal info about other titles coming from Ravensburger in early 2023:

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 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."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. I won’t go into the full gameplay here because it’s so similar to how I explained Family Inc. But the gameplay differences are notable, as I find myself preferring them as well. So why wait? Join the search for El Dorado today and experience the thrill of the hunt in this exciting and engaging board game.

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. 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." 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. At the end of your turn, put all cards you placed above your expedition board during phase 1 (i.e. all the cards you played excluding any cards that were completely removed from the game) face up on your discard pile. As for the aforementioned expansions, Knizia says, "Being able to control doing the graphics, it gives me freedom to do expansions myself for different territories. There are lots of expansion opportunities in El Dorado, and the advantage now is that I don't have to convince an individual publisher. I discuss it with Vincent, and we do it."Much like the original, the game has a traditional Indiana Jones setting, so there are some mystical elements (see the front cover). However, the game is primarily about exploring the jungle with machetes and boats, finding treasure, and so on. I don’t find anything in the game particularly inappropriate for younger children, although the complexity of the game led to the publisher suggesting 10 years and up on the box. Reiner Knizia loves to revisit his strongest brands with designs that put a spin on what makes them shine. It’s smart from a business perspective, as these brands already have a built-in following, and it’s fun from a fan’s perspective, as you get to see a designer riff on the concept. Yet as I’ve mentioned with other lines (Azul, Super Skill Pinball, Keyflower), they also run the risk of intimidating newcomers or burning out fans. 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. Boss’s are great to roll in terms of explosion avoidance and tiebreakers, yet they contribute nothing to your chances of having the highest sum and outright winning the round. So do you keep a boss result from your first or second roll, or reroll it?! Arghh!