Playing is this great balance of decision making and random chance: you'll use cards from your unique hand to take actions, and each card has two different actions on – one top, one bottom. If you use the top action on your first card, you must use the bottom action on your second – this gives you flexibility, but potentially exactly enough flexibility to hoist yourself by your own petard. But how many matching cards should you collect before trading? Whoever trades a colour first gets higher-value tokens. But if you trade a larger number of cards in one go, you get special bonus tokens with big points of their own, on top of the regular tokens. So, can you afford to spend one more turn collecting another couple of cards and going for the big payout? Or will your opponent nip in first and leave you with just the leftovers?

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

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. Added to this are extra one-use cards you can have in your hand that break the rules even more, plus the way the game encourages you to form alliances to stop players who are doing too well (and then potentially screw over your allies if you want). It’s a game that’s guaranteed to get you laughing when everyone’s best laid plans crumble. 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! Spyfall is brilliantly simple to play, because all you do is ask questions to each other. Except choosing which questions to ask and how to answer is not simple at all. The setup here is that one player is secretly a (seemingly terrible) spy, who doesn't know what location they're in (from a big list provided in the box). Everyone else does know the location, and they need to figure out who the spy is, at which point they can accuse someone, and everyone votes. The spy wins if they successfully guess the location, or if someone else is wrongfully voted as being the spy. You have 10 minutes to ask each other questions. Go! Cards provide a movement to a green jungle space, a blue water space or a yellow desert space. Movement is slightly complicated (in a good way) by the necessity of certain cards being used. Symbols on the board dictate the value of the card required to move onto that space. For example a space with two machetes, requires a card with two or more machetes on it. Surplus machetes can be used on subsequent squares if there is a neighbouring matching type. Therefore, a card bearing three machetes could move you along three spaces bearing a single machete. However, cards cannot be combined to move you onto a single space. So you cannot combine two cards with a single machete on to move onto a two machete space.

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At first, you can only plant seeds of new trees near your existing trees, but as your trees get bigger, you can spread out more broadly, and that's where things get crunchy. You're all competing for the same prime spaces, but your trees take several turns to grow, so are you able to predict what will be in light and what will be in shadow in three turns time? And should you keep a big tree around to cast shadows and cause your opponents problems, or trade it in for the points you need to win the game (leaving a new gap for your opponents to use in the process)? For a small and light board game that contains enough strategy to play over and over, while also not being intimidating to new players, Splendor is the ideal option. It's a game of buying cards by paying a cost in gems of different colours, and every card you buy gives you more gems you can use to buy cards more easily, so everything snowballs satisfyingly as you play – the only way to buy the higher-value cards is to have a great suite of other cards in front of you. So, if you play a round where the location is a submarine, someone might ask "Did you see anything nice out of the window this morning?", hoping the spy will say "Yes, a beautiful sunrise" and you'll all accuse them. But maybe the spy says "Well, in the job I have here, I don't really go anywhere near windows in the mornings". A totally generic statement that could apply to all kinds of thing, and that might throw them off your scent.

El Dorado | Board Game | BoardGameGeek El Dorado | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

We like to say that Cosmic Encounter is the board game equivalent of Mario Kart – practice will make you better at it, but just enough wild stuff happens in each game that a beginner always has a chance of winning, which makes it great for both first-time players and veterans. So, you and the other players have to work together to plan ahead, triaging where the danger is now, and analysing what’s vulnerable in the future. Who can get to Beijing the fastest to treat the situation there? Madrid's at risk of an outbreak next turn, but focusing on that would delay your ability to cure one of the diseases by a whole round, so what do you focus on? Each player also a has an extra power that makes them good at specific tasks, so you need to make you’re using them effectively – don't have your Researcher treating disease cubes when they're the best at finding the cures… unless you really need them to. What this means in practice is that each medium needs to guess a correct combination of person, location and weapon (very Cluedo) from a selection in the middle of the table. But the ghost can't talk or gesture at all to guide them.Aside from Wettlauf nach El Dorado, I have minimal info about other titles coming from Ravensburger in early 2023:

The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples | Board Game

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. I'm still awaiting a response from Ravensburger North America as to whether this new version will appear in English. Update, Dec. 9, 2022: I've received word from Ravensburger North America that this new version of The Quest for El Dorado will be released in North America in 2023. And in that way it’s kind of like a puzzle to figure out how to get across the board in the smoothest path.Even seemingly easy wins can be tight decisions: there are only five cards in the middle of the table to take from at any time, and if three greens come out, you might think that’s a great bonus for you… but those three will be replaced with something as soon as you take them, and what if it’s something more valuable that you leave open to the other player? 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!

Eldorado | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

A clever tension is added by the card system at the heart of the game: to cure diseases for good, you need to collect sets of matching-colour cards. Except that these cards are also the fastest way to move around the board, and if you use them to travel, you can't then use them to cure, so again you're working out whether you need to spend a valuable card zipping across the board to prevent an outbreak, or whether you can risk leaving it to someone else… but you know that more disease will come out in the mean time. 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.Dice are cruel, and sometimes you don't roll anything that's especially useful, but it's possible for players to leave a dice in a location to be used by another player. Here's where it gets clever: your Delorean and someone else's can't be in the same location at the same time without causing yet more paradoxes… but you can actually leave a dice in a location in the past, and someone who's in that location in the future can make use of it.