Overly Fawning Overview
This game is the sh*t. How you can design games for 30 years straight at an effective pace of 1 game design every 3-4 weeks and still have something this good and this fresh left in the tank is beyond me. Holy wow.
I've played it nearly 20 times now in the past month and I don't see how I would ever tire of it. It is compelling, challenging, creative, and... comedic! I have never laughed so hard while playing any strategy game.
Gameplay & Game Experience
This won't really be a gameplay-focused review, as will soon become clear, but it's worth describing in general terms how the game functions and some of the choices Knizia has made and has asked players to make.
In Quest for El Dorado, players build a deck to help traverse a treacherous jungle terrain gaily bedight, as gallant knights, in sunshine and in shadow, and journey long, singing a song, in search of eponymous <PERSON>.
This is a deckbuilding game, obviously. It's not a terribly complicated one, either. The main thing that distinguishes it from Dominion [as all DBGs must ultimately do in defining themselves] is that "buys" for VP take the form of movement on the board toward the first-past-the-post endgame condition instead of additional cards for your deck.
Dominion played where all of your VP buys went in a stack in your play area rather than into your deck would be a really crappy variation on the theme, since the gold-vs-vp tension in-hand and the well-timed management of the same is the entire beating heart of Dominion, and is the ingenious kernel of an idea that made the entire thing tick.
A race to a given number of VP purchases (even if represented by spaces on a race track) driven by a Dominion clone needs something more. 304
What <PERSON> has done here is clever: He’s interleaved 4 different currencies (discards are the fourth, seasoned Questers) corresponding to varying terrain types, and then asked the player to plot their way through a highly non-linear and diversely branching series of currency demands (essentially, terrain spaces are VPs that must be bought in sequence) in order to reach the end faster than their opponents.
In most map setups you will need some of every currency at some point in your journey, but shortcuts (or longwayrounds) and plan b’s taken or not will greatly influence the extent (and frequency) to which you’ll rely on any particular currency or card type along your journey. There isn’t often a Dominion-esque ramping-up / mana-curve phenomena, since the demands to be met for additional VPs aren’t a stable threshold number you need to hit, but rather a constantly moving target that changes as you pass through earlier requirements.
You definitely do feel your deck improving as the game goes on, but the exciting thing here is that the improvement isn't really a gradual climb to a plateau after which your engine is running near peak efficiency and you just churn it until endgame--the engine-building isn't monotonic or asymptotic toward any particular clearly defined ideal end state.
Instead, you have a sort of fits-and-starts, hills-and-valleys shape to the deployment of your deck against the terrain challenges standing between you and the finish line. Knizia has done well in capturing in board game form the feel of scrambling over boulders, blasting down rushing rivers, negotiating safe passage, or hacking through dense jungle.
The primary challenge of the game is to determine and execute a general plan of attack that best suits the map (which is known at the outset) and the demands that it will place on your deck throughout the game, while adjusting on-the-fly to setbacks when you don’t get the card draws you need at the time you need them but still need to keep moving forward. This is not a small feat, and missing a needed card at an inopportune time because the timing or result of your shuffles didn’t work how you'd hoped is a frequent event, demanding on-your-toes-ism.
The game offers relatively few and scattered chances to slim your deck, which makes these opportunities very powerful and also necessitates very careful thought about what you fill your deck up with. (As a side note to concerns over trashing being overpowered: it’s supposed to be; it’s in line with Dominion in this regard. Trash well and trash often. Trashing demands good planning as there is an explicit time cost if you repeatedly invoke the power; the market also allows other players to employ denial plays to limit the effectiveness of your leaner deck. 237