‘In the legendary city of El Dorado, you will gather resources and knowledge to gain the favour of the Old Ones. Build, craft and worship in a multitude of ways. Immortality is within reach, if you can satisfy The Old Ones of El Dorado.’
The first thing I have to get out of the way is that I don’t see the fascination with Cthulhu and the Old Ones in boardgames—I find H.P. Lovecraft’s writing turgid and uninteresting. Having said that, I’ve played Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu a few times and found it enjoyable, though that’s thanks to the mechanics, not the theme. I feel the same holds for this game that turned up on Kickstarter, even if what you’re aiming to do is bring the ancient gods into the world rather than banish them—was there any need for designer Bruno Liguori Sia to introduce the Old Ones, instead of picking (or making up) some Aztec gods? I suppose this leaves them less open to accusations of cultural appropriation, though that doesn’t seem to have slowed down the Tikal Legend folk. But no matter, The Old Ones of El Dorado does look like a well thought out and fun game.
One of the neat features of this 1–5 player game is that you have to progress along 2 tracks in order to succeed, the Physical World and the Other-lands, and the worker cards you play with are split into 2 halves, one for each. On your turn, you can choose to follow the upper or lower path when executing card actions, but that doesn’t imply residing solely within one of those worlds, as cards can be placed either way up in their action rows.
Beside the cards, you will be dealing with a range of resource tokens, split into two groups. Basic resources are fairly easy to gain: clay, stone, gold, villagers and followers. (Yes, people in this game are mere resources!) While you can sometimes simply come across the other type, gold and clay masks, collectively known as crafted resources, they tend to have to be constructed from a mix of basic resources.
There are quite a lot of things to juggle as you play. On the main board, you’ll find action sites, beside which worker cards are played, a central building site area, where a pyramid-shaped temple will gradually form, sacrifice tracks at the top and a village area at the bottom. On your player mat, referred to as the sanctum board, there are upper and lower sanctums and an area for your resources—including madness tokens (these are not good things to have too many of).
Summary of Play
Your turn starts off with either playing a single card to an action row or removing all cards from a row into your hand.
An action row has a player count dependent maximum number of cards (slightly randomised for 3 players); if a row is full, you can’t add another card to it. Assuming there is space, when you place a card into a row, you can decide to lay it down Physical World or Other-lands end up, and then you walk your keeper token along the row right to left, optionally performing the actions on the top half of the cards. If you choose to skip over a card’s actions, you can instead remove a madness token from your sanctum board. The journey ends on the main board, in the action site, where unlike with the action row cards, you can choose to activate either the upper or lower half to gain the indicated reward. From there, you move the keeper into the favour queue, and if other players’ keepers are already in that queue, they gain an additional reward, the type of which is randomly assigned at the start of the game.
There is a card hand limit of 5, and you aren’t allowed to take cards from an action row unless you can add them all to your hand. As with playing cards into a row, when you take cards, you activate the row (before removing the cards!), this time using the lower halves, until you get to the action site, where—again—you have the choice of upper or lower rewards, and from there to the favour queue. This time, other players with keepers in that queue site will gain the reward as above, but also take a madness token. There is a fixed number of resource slots on sanctum boards, and if there isn’t space for that additional madness token (subject to a maximum of 5), the player will have to discard one of their other resources to make room.
The possible actions are all about gaining and converting resources. In the Physical World, you can gain the basic resources mentioned earlier or can craft clay into clay masks or gold into gold masks, removing the clay or gold token from your resource row and adding the appropriate mask token in its place.
Those masks can be used in the Other-lands actions: when you activate a worship action, you can either move a clay or gold mask from your resource row to a spot in the upper sanctum area of your board, taking the action indicated by the icon you cover in so doing; alternatively, discard a follower from your resource row and gain a reward from the lower sanctum. Pairs of corresponding upper and lower sanctum ‘plinths’ are worth final scoring victory points.
There are many more Other-lands actions… And I haven’t even mentioned tablet cards yet: 2 triplets of randomly selected Other-lands reward-generating cards for each player. The sculpt action lets you play clay or gold into the tablets, performing the actions on a card if you completely fill it. The demand action lets you move your collector token around the village map, picking up rewards as you go. In the build action, you add stone blocks from your resource row to current temple level in the building site; as each level is completed, players are rewarded depending on how many stone cubes they’ve contributed. The final Other-lands action is sacrifice: take a follower or villager from your resources and lie it at the edge of the current temple level, performing one of the actions indicated there.
The game ends as soon as any player has 30 VPs, then points from crafted masks, remaining basic resources, paired plinths and lower sanctum tiles are added on. Highest score is the winner.
The rulebook outlines a modified 2-player game, which add ‘shadow keepers’ to the game to slightly increase the interaction between players. Solo mode involves an automa known as the Scholar (which can also be added to a 2-player game as an additional player). A neat feature of the solo game is that the automa cards provide a hint of the action to be taken on their backs, letting the player plan ahead a little to, say, prevent the actual action from taking place.
Campaign Shenanigans
As happened with Canals of Windcrest, this is The Old Ones of El Dorado’s second bite at crowdfunding because the first didn’t reach its goal instantly. Actually, that’s not 100% true: the original campaign did hit its funding target within a couple of days, albeit only just, but that wasn’t enough for the creators, as they explained in the penultimate update of the campaign: ‘the game deserves a better launch than it is currently experiencing,’ and they ‘want to take some time to fix any marketing issues so we can give this game the launch it deserves and provide you with the highest quality game possible.’ I can’t say I fully understand why they thought things wouldn’t improve in the following days, especially if they deployed their marketing plans then, but I have to admit I have zero experience in running a crowdfunding project—but is, dare I call it, ‘gaming the system’ how crowdfunding works these days? Incidentally, in that update post, Dranda Games asked for feedback on what worked or didn’t work about the campaign and game—the comments do make for interesting reading.
In the old campaign’s final update, Drando Games said the main marketing failure was a newsletter email list glitch?! They also outlined some of the changes they’re making to the game, and promising a relaunch… Well, that relaunch has just taken place, and for what it’s worth, it did pass its funding goal within a day (though not hugely dramatically, which I don’t fully understand when comparing this campaign to other recent ones).
Impressions
The Old Ones of El Dorado has a lot of moving (and stationary!) pieces, but—as is the case with many games—it looks a lot more daunting than it actually it. Mostly what you’re doing is gathering basic building blocks, then combining them into more complex ones, and converting those into scoring points; all of this driven by running engine tracks.
The game is attractive (artwork by Jacqui Davis), even in its current prototype state, and the theme is fun, if somewhat morbid (my reservations about Cthulhu notwithstanding).
You can find out more on the Kickstarter pages, but do bear in mind that the final game may well differ in details. The page includes links to a rulebook and Tabletop Simulator mod.
I should mention the Kickstarter rewards: the base game seems to have quite a reasonable price (and the campaign page says VAT is already taken into account, so there should be few surprises later on), and the equally modestly priced deluxe upgrade has a few interesting additions: a smattering of extra tiles to add more variety as well as a ‘quest’ mechanism (objective cards specific to each player). However, I’m not so impressed with the other add-ons: I think the metal madness tokens, purple tentacles, are quite unattractive, and the (neoprene?) main board mat seems unnecessary. As a subtle hint to the acquisition managers of any game store who might be reading this, the retail pledge is worth taking a look at :-)
Finally, as this is the 9th Kickstarter campaign run by Birmingham’s Dranda Games, I think it’s safe to say they know what they’re doing here—though, of course, you can never rule out unexpected hiccoughs.
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
