The Quest for El Dorado

Setup: 2–4 players. The 2023 manual uses eight starting cards per player—one Sailor, three Explorers and four Travelers—and 54 market cards, three each of 18 types. Shuffle your starting deck and draw four. Six designated types start on the market board; assemble a route with terrain tiles and blockades. Cave tokens are optional.

Turn: play movement cards first, then buy up to one card with the remaining cards. Discard played cards; individually keep or discard unplayed cards, then draw up to four. If already holding four or more, draw none. Reshuffle discards only when needed to complete a draw.

Movement: a single card must match a landscape space’s symbol and meet its power. Remaining power may pay for further adjacent spaces of that type, but weak cards cannot combine to enter one expensive landscape space. Stop at any time and lose unused power. Mountains and occupied spaces are forbidden.

Special spaces: rubble requires the printed number of arbitrary cards, which are discarded normally. Base camps require that many cards to be permanently removed from the game. The two costs have different effects on your deck.

Market: coin cards contribute their printed power; other cards contribute half a coin each, with no change. Buy at most one card and put it in your discard pile. Only when a market slot is vacant may you buy from an off-board type, moving that pile into the slot.

Items and actions: using a crossed-out item’s function removes it permanently; using it as half a coin or a rubble payment discards it normally. Purple actions may be played during movement or buying as instructed. Native ignores an adjacent space’s requirement or clears a blockade, but cannot enter mountains or occupied spaces.

Blockades and finish: pay a blockade like a space and keep it; later players pass freely. Reaching a finish space triggers the last round; move the piece onto the gate to free the space. Finish the current round. Among finishers, most blockades wins, then highest numbered blockade; if none has one, earliest arrival wins.

Two players: use two adventurers each, with the starting player on spaces 1 and 3 and the other on 2 and 4. Both pieces must finish. Each movement card applies to one piece only and cannot split its power between them. Your own pieces block each other; if both players finish, apply the usual tie-breakers.