How to Play The Quest for El Dorado: Cards, Movement & Market
The Quest for El Dorado is a deck-building race. Cards in your hand provide movement through jungle, water and village terrain or money for buying stronger cards. Your deck improves while your explorer advances across the map.
Draw a hand from your personal deck
Each player begins with the same small deck. Draw the normal hand size at the start of your turn cycle. When the draw pile empties, shuffle the discard pile to create a new draw deck.
Play cards to move through matching terrain
Movement cards show values for terrain types. Spend sufficient value to enter adjacent spaces of the matching terrain. Unused movement from a card follows the rulebook’s restrictions and cannot always be freely converted across terrain types.
Occupied spaces create blocking
Explorers occupy map spaces and can make narrow routes temporarily unavailable. Chokepoints make timing and route choice part of the deck-building puzzle.
Use cards as money to buy from the market
Instead of using every card for movement, spend eligible card value to buy one market card. The purchased card goes to your discard pile and becomes available only after cycling back through the deck.
The market changes when a pile empties
When an available card pile is depleted, new card types can enter the active market from the reserve according to the base-game market rules. Buying can therefore change options for everyone.
Caves and map modules add route-specific effects
Some setups use cave tokens or terrain features that provide one-time benefits. Resolve them when entering or interacting with those spaces as the scenario/setup instructions specify.
First explorer to El Dorado wins, subject to finish rules
The goal is to reach the final El Dorado space. If multiple players arrive in the same final round, use the barrier/tiebreak rules from the current Ravensburger edition.