Room-in-a-box, Sep 2022
I liked Deckscape’s original game quite a bit, when I first tried it, but their following games have often struggled to win me over; so having heard that El Dorado was one of the weaker games in the series, I didn’t have high hopes for it. Perhaps with the benefit of those low expectations, I ended up finding it surprisingly enjoyable.
As with their other games, El Dorado is a small box of cards, which you work through in a semi-linear way, with some cards being puzzles that you must solve to get past. In place of any answer verification mechanism, you simply flip the card to see the solution on the back, and mark down a penalty point if you’ve got it wrong. At the end of the game any such penalty points are added to time taken to evaluate how well you did.
I rarely like penalty systems of that sort, and El Dorado is eager to dish out black marks, occasionally even when the players haven’t actually made any errors. However, it also has a system where penalty marks aren’t permanent until you’ve accumulated more than two, and has multiple places where the game tells you to erase some of them. Over the course of the game I found that made them much less annoying, and more like just a health stat for our characters – which is how they’re presented.
Deckspace games tend to have cheerful cartoon-y artwork and swashbuckling adventure stories that don’t take themselves too seriously. That’s true of El Dorado too, which provides an energetic mix jumping between jungle and volcano and plane crash. In fact there’s arguably too much emphasis on story, in that the puzzles were pretty light, such as ‘find a path’ puzzles and those that show a picture of the characters’ situation and ask what they should do. The latter often felt like needing to guess at the puzzle designer’s intention, though for some reason that bothered me less than it usually would – with the exception of one card that seemed straight out unfair.
El Dorado clearly doesn’t win everyone over, but for me it was a reasonable entry in the series, although one that’s more of a choose your own adventure type experience than one that provides a serious puzzle challenge. Along with the other Deckscape games it’s one of the most portable options available for a boxed escape game, and provides a pleasant, if light, diversion for an evening. 
