Ravensburger offers one of the most diverse and innovative collections of games you can find, all designed with the highest quality standards for content and materials. On future turns, you can give more dreams to the mediums, hopefully helping to narrow things down (but sometimes making confusion worse). However, you only have seven turns to solve the whole murder, so don't get too comfortable. Cooperative vs competitive– some games have everyone working together towards a common goal, while others are all about beating the opposition. Both are tons of fun, but some people like to work together more than they like a competitive atmosphere, so it’s just about reading the room. In The Quest for El Dorado by Ravensburger players traverse jungle, waterways, and native villages to find the elusive treasure. They must prepare well to make the journey. But they can’t spend all their time preparing or they’ll be left behind and another explorer will beat them to it. There’s almost no better way to introduce someone to modern board games than this. Adorable wooden whales! 3D scenery! Dump your friends in the water, then eat them with sharks!

Eldorado | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

During your turn, you’ll be able to do a bunch of stuff – go searching for supplies at different exterior locations, barricade doors, kill zombies…– that will help the colony. The traitor won’t want to be given away, so that player will be putting on a show of helping at least, but any supplies (which can be fuel, food, weapons and other treats) you find are secret information that only you know, so when everyone’s desperate for food, you can claim to be unable to help despite sitting on a Sainsburys’ worth of ready meals. Withholding supplies might not be as effective as you wanted, though, so maybe you'll resort to actual sabotage, but then everyone will know there's a traitor, even if they don't know who. (You can choose to play with no traitor at all if you prefer, and it's still a very fun cooperative game that way.) If you already own The Quest for El Dorado and enjoy it, or are looking for other inspiration, you might also like these similar games: In this game, you're battling to win nine poker hands at once against your opponent, and whoever actually comes out on top in the majority of them is the victor. You'll each have cards with numbers in different coloured suits in your hand, and each turn you'll lay a card on one of the nine 'battles'. The worst thing I can say about the components is the cards are those mini cards rather than standard sized, and though I understand the space-saving reasons for using them they just don't shuffle or play as well as regular cards. The Best of El Dorado I didn’t have any problems understanding the rulebook. Of course this is a very simple game to learn when compared to most modern board games. If you are looking for a perfect gateway game to modern board games then this one would rank right up there with Catan or Pandemic on gateway games. I believe it is at least on par with complexity to learn with those.On a player’s turn they can play all cards from their hand or keep some in hand for their next turn. 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! If a player comes to a stop next to a cave, that player explores it. The player takes the top cave token and puts it face up in front of them. Theme vs mechanics– Some people enjoy games more when there’s a strong theme that helps them grasp the mechanics (or just that adds atmosphere), while some will only want to focus on the mechanics and will be happy with ‘abstract’ games that are all about the rules, really.

Island of El Dorado: The Thieves of El Dorado | Board The Island of El Dorado: The Thieves of El Dorado | Board

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. The campaign you'll play through actually teaches you how to play, so it's much smoother to start with than similar games. But you'll still want to get the same group together for each new play, so it'll be less ideal for some because of that. And by the end, if you love it, you can move up to the much more expensive, much more expansive, regular version of Gloomhaven. How to choose the best board games for you It does have an adventure theme to it but a very light adventure theme. Honestly it’s not so much an adventure as it’s just a straight up race. There are no tiles to flip and explore other than the cave stuff. OH YEAH! The cave stuff. This is the one aspect of the game that shakes it up a bit and even though the instructions come off like the cave tiles are optional, I wouldn’t ever play a game without them. With the actually rather large pile of different tiles for the caves you will shuffle those up and place 4 facedown cave tiles on each cave space on the map. Now there is only one cave on each gameboard tile and if you end your movement next to a cave then you can nab the top cave tile for yourself and these have different beneficial things on them to aid you on your journey. The main reason I like these so much is they add some much needed flavor to the game. Visually the game is so-so. The art isn’t bad per say but it’s just….bland. I mean I know I said it earlier but this game just needs some flash added to it in all aspects.When your best laid plans (and tiles) work perfectly, playing Azul is akin to the feeling of suddenly sweeping through the last few words of a crossword you’ve been struggling with – everything slots neatly into place. Crucially, even when that's not how it goes, it's still a lot of fun, and fiddling with its chunky plastic tiles is reason enough to buy it, to be honest.

El Dorado board game review The Quest for El Dorado board game review

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! Nothing to scream about with the box. It’s on the smaller side and, well, it’s a box. No insert of any kind so you will want to bag up all the cards. There really isn’t a ton of stuff that needs to be bagged up so for this game in particular it really isn’t a big deal it doesn’t have an insert. It is a smaller sized box so you can for sure squeeze it on your shelf.

Setup

At the start of the game, you'll place two small trees in spaces near the edge of the hexagonal board, and you'll have a bank of more small trees, medium trees and large trees ready for later in the game. You'll also place the huge sun token along two sides of the board. The sun's light beams in straight lines across the board from the token, and if your trees get touched by it, you get light points, which you can spent to plant more trees, or grow your existing ones. When a player reaches one of the 3 finishing spaces at El Dorado, this triggers the final round of the game. Each player left in that round will now play their final turn. A family company since 1883, Ravensburger offers high-quality, age appropriate games, puzzles, arts&crafts and STEM based science kits that foster enjoyment, education and family togetherness. Ravensburger is dedicated to the philosophy that starting children off early by stimulating their minds and hands helps not only to develop fine motor, artistic and exploring skills but also fosters a sense of accomplishment.

El Dorado: Golden Temples Ravensburger The Quest for El Dorado: Golden Temples

Some grey spaces on the board allow players to discard cards of any type to move onto them. And red Base Camp spaces allow players to remove cards from the game.The best Lego Star Wars sets from all the movies, featuring classic characters right up to the latest sequels If you’re only interested in receiving the newest games this is the box for you; guaranteeing only the latest games! Buy New Releases Box » 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. It plays good at 3 and 4 and honestly the 2 player game was interesting as well with the way it is done. You have to really have a nice balance for controlling two different character pieces although it usually boils down to making the best move with whatever cards you have in your hand on that turn. It doesn’t have a solo mode but is super easy enough to play solo controlling 3 tokens if you want to learn it by yourself before playing with others.