El Dorado and Heroes & Hexes expansion - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

this is the quest for El Dorado and this is the expansion which we'll get to in a bit El Dorado short for elevated Dorado is a straightforward game about expeditions doing their best to go either straight or forward as they struggle towards the mythical city of dole so let's start with the fact that everything about getting this game to the table is so easy going it's easy to teach easy to get excited by it's easy to fit in to your life since you can always set up a course that makes the game tougher or quicker and easier if you see your uncle screwing up his face during the rules explanation like a paper bag then you can just jump chop of the caves out of the game making it simpler and it's still great it scales great with four players good with three and thanks to some real changes it's great if there's just two of you but once your friends start playing El Dorado you'll be plunging them into a juicy jungle of sweaty decisions that lines a little wrenchy but we're gonna stick with it so El Dorado is what's known as a deck building game alright every player is gonna start with a deck representing their expedition an unfocused gaggle of explorers travelers and a single sailor who's almost certainly lost now on your turn you're going to draw a hand from your deck and play cards from that hand to whack your way forward machete icons will carry you into a jungle coins will pay your way through villages and oz will send you splashing into rivers and once you know that you're going to stop seeing this plain looking map and instead you'll see a worrisome obstacle course full of different paths and deadly pitfalls you see when you choose where to end your movement for that turn you're kind of gambling on what your next hand will look like oh and if you gamble wrong you're not going to be able to move at all and maybe that's not a bad thing at the end of your turn any coin cards you didn't spend moving can instead be spent at the shop perhaps bringing in a useful jack of all trades a cartographer who when you draw him drags two more cards into your hand or even photographers who bring in yet more money eventually letting your expedition pay for just absurd things like a plane or talking to someone who actually lives here Oh lots to choose from but don't worry in fact when players go shopping they can only buy these six cards that are in the shop and only once one of those stacks has been bought by everybody just the next player who goes shopping get the opportunity to buy anything they want but what they choose then enters the shop and this is an exquisite bit of balancing because it keeps eldorado fast and accessible because everyone's got a limited tamps down selection of options and yeah for experienced players it means they don't just build the same kind of deck every time because they have to adapt what is available incidentally if you've never played a deck building game before oh you're in for a treat the question of what your deck needs and the responsibilities involved followed by your own mistakes hitting you in the face for the rest of the game as you draw a card that wasn't quite right over and over it's satisfying and rewarding and just so much fun watching this thing grow if alvarado had just been these two halves travel and shopping I would have been down with that I mean that's the foundation of most package holidays but where this starts becoming a great game is the way these two halves of the game each start trying to seduce you so cards without coins if you don't spend them for movement can actually be spent as a kind of loose change that's half a coin each but let's say on your turn you draw of this hand and want to do some travel and some shopping well you could do that or you could not move and then save the money and buy an even better card for the rest of the game that actually makes a kind of sense so you do that and then oh god your friends are running away leaving you behind what were you thinking this is a race even better is that players have the option of taking detours two camps on the board that permanent remove one of the cards in your hand from the game making your deck leaner meaner more focused Oh Steve oh sweet ol Steve this sweet Steve machine listen some people in the camp definitely not me I've been talking about how you're slowing us down so I know it's awful but maybe you could just stay here that camp for some time and most ridiculously at all this racecourse is run through with caves like Swiss cheese and if you go near one you'll get an unknown reward are you ready go divert from your racing line for that can you really resist the siren song of random charts in addition though to making the Det building just better the racing in El Dorado actually fixes a problem that's kind of dogged the genre of deck builders since they first arrived which is when I'm watching you take your turn in a deck builder your turns are kind of boring to me because you're tinkering with something that I don't fully understand in El Dorado though your friends turns are fascinating not just because they're fast not just because they're racing you but because of one very excellent very stupid rule that means all the turns in El Dorado are extremely interactive which is the players cannot move through each other being stuck behind a player is almost always going to block the easiest path forward but sometimes it's gonna block all your pass forward you are stuck and in a slower game that mechanic would be infuriating but in the pepe game of El Dorado it's just funny not least because players who are in the lead probably have the worst decks which means there's this sensation of Formula one cars trying to overtake a van maybe the best way to summarize why El Dorado is so good is the mystery that sort of permeates the whole game the opaque nature of deck building means everyone is have excited as to what's gonna happen next you can be in last place and still have a good feeling that you can win this because your deck might take off late and rocket due to the front then imagine what it's like being in first place where yes you're winning and that's exciting but you're also living in fear of your friends catching up to you very quickly your deck will become full of so many cards that you have no idea what you're gonna draw what it's going to mean for you let me be crystal clear it's possible to have turns in Eldorado when you travel a lot or turns where you buy a lot but it's also possible to just have good turns and bad turns dreadful turns turns that have the whole table laughing at you or turns that have the whole table going what as you somehow cross an entire fifth of the board in ten seconds in conclusion El Dorado is just superb it is simple it's stirring it's surprisingly cheap and it's moorish because you're always playing with a different map and their sharp ends up being a bit different and also as an added bonus it's easier to get people to play then trains which is my actual favorite deck building game but it looks like a parody of modern board games so no one wants to play it with me and that's fine on the off chance that you have never bought a modern designer board game before and you're looking for an affordable first up into the Hobby my goodness I would say by pandemic but then if you kept looking at me I would say something like you know or you could buy like Carcassonne or maybe El Dorado it's that good it's like third down if you push me oh and like pandemic and Carcassonne if you want to sex things up a bit you can spend a little extra money on an expansion which is Spanish for expansion I admire the base game of El Dorado for being such a balanced clean design but I also admire the heroes and hexes expansion for being willing to dirty things up a bit at the top of the billing on new map tiles with these hexed hexagons in purple spaces that you can travel into not by paying a cards were by drawing a nonce to Big South American curse perhaps you'll enter a curse basin ah oh no you have to put a useless curse card in your deck like a wasting disease that's afflicting your expedition or maybe oh no you're struck with paralysis and every other player on the board gets to move forward one space I love the idea of these cursed hexagons I love that they've peppered the board with these wild spaces the players can then define themselves by either flinging themselves headlong into or shrewdly avoiding hmm but what's really disappointing is that about half of these cursed tokens that you might draw are some variant on miss a bit of your go you flip it ah you see some are glyph I need to look up in the manual and you read oh yeah okay the next time you play this card it doesn't happen mending your future turns a bit of a stuttering quality overall I love the idea of this expansion module but in play I'd honestly think it lives up to its potential the expansion also adds special hero cards by far the most powerful cards in the game and they join you for free if you take a detour to the new hero camp and you're willing to put up with some truly meddling parodies my friends had a lot of time for Christopher Dundee and Gertrude Everdene less so for the riffs on Guybrush Threepwood Nathan Drake and Magellan mechanically I love these heroes I love that everyone gets something unique that differentiates their deck and special power you can try and build your deck around thematically I think they're kind of a misstep I mean maybe you can agree with me that whatever you're doing with the theme of your game everything mechanics are assets illustration writing should be pulling in the same direction having a completely straight faced game with this one corner stuffed full of goofiness kind of rubs me the wrong way I don't know I might be being fussy let's move on now before the games even begun everyone's dealt their own little mascot with their own little name and that's a really nice bit of color but also you can whenever your animal is drawn overwork them for a one-time bonus that triples the power of that animal but then they are gone from your deck because they're dead or they're off to phone in their union or something and this I love because it does fit with the theme I think it's great that it adds so much color and flavor without players having to learn many more rules I think these stupid animals are the height of elegance here that Ripley finally you get four new kinds of cards that you can buy from the shop broadening everyone's options but not too much and adding just a little more variety there's also the geologist who lets you move on to the previously impossible mountain spaces which is so exciting but sounds really boring so I think I have to gloss over it no I'm not gonna glass over it listen sometimes there are mountains and often they can define the heck's they're on because you get these winding sneaky paths the idea of putting someone in your deck who can get you over those bypassing bypass bypassing some of the course but then of course you've still got the geology's you have to buy them ahead of time they even gonna show up in time EEP are you picking up what I'm putting down it's it's it's interesting so we recommend the original game do we recommend the expansion I don't know listen this is a box of bells and whistles that is going to delight people who love the original game it delighted me and my friends but I didn't have to buy it you see this box actually has quite a high price tag but it does not have a high quantity or an exceptionally high quality of ideas and actually that doesn't go on up too far away actually that doesn't surprise me because this expansion is numbered this is expansion number one and whenever I see that I always hear yeah there is not much in this box but Dad why because we will be giving you the chance to buy another expansion it's a German board game not just racist anyway if you want this I think you can buy it I think you have fun with it but if money is in any way tight for you I think that rather than buying this expansion just keep your money and put it towards a brand new game and since this has been kind of a short review do you want to humor me and just take a look at one more Racing board game do you want to look at the racing board game that got me into this hobby do you want to see the board game that in a way caused me to start shut up and sit down [Applause] [Music] say hello to Robo rally this game was proud in 1994 by Richard Garfield and Wizards of the coast between two little releases called Magic the Gathering and netrunner this is a beloved riot of a race game about robots rushing across a factory floor that received no less than five expansions in its day each round players simultaneously programmed five actions from a deeply inadequate hand of nine cards and then you execute what happens with robots inevitably knocking one another off course and players just making mistakes causing robots to get on the wrong conveyor belt or get seared by a flamethrower or just sprint excitedly into a bin this is a first-rate puzzle but it is also frequently side-splitting ly funny I mean the robots are funny like when they get turned around due to a mistake in the programming and then I'm not rushing away from the finish line as fast as possible but also it's funny to watch your friends on some of the more difficult boards is the manual even refers to this thing called I think of robot dance where players you can watch your friends turning left and right as they try and visualize where the robot will be after they moved to rotate move move left and because this is mad genius Richard Garfield were talking about and because this was the 90s there's all kinds of crazy nonsense in the deck of option cards equipment that you can stick on your robot with these man 3d renders if you go for a pit stop there's a missile that flies around the board that you have to program in addition to your robot there's teleporters and bridges that you put on the board but then anyone can use I adore this game I spent so much of my childhood playing it but it's not something we often talk about on shut up and sit down because it's not that you can't buy it anymore it's worse than that the Robo rally license was passed to Avalon Hill in 2005 and the additions they put out since then have been bad they're ugly and flimsy but also just much less ambitious I don't want to exaggerate what this state of affairs is like for me but imagine if you loved someone and they moved out of your house and then moved in with a vampire who continues to this day to suck the life out of them but it's okay because you still have to your loved ones discard its carapace and you can hold it close to yourself and remember what they used to smell like lead in all seriousness what's interesting and extra annoying about the avalon hill version is they released their noxious Edition in 2005 but then try to reboot it in 2016 by bringing in richard garfield who made all kinds of modernizing tweaks to his original 90s design but then they still released this rebooted 2016 version with the same loveless aesthetics that they did before no one seems to have bought or seems to want this new edition of rubber alley ii when you look at all of the expansion boxes that were released for the 1994 edition of the Wizards of the coast rocker alley all of them added more components more complexity more color more stupidity more flavor which is to say that's what the fans wanted and yet those are all of the things that Avalon Hill crowbarred out of Robo rally for their new edition it is as you'd imagine quite difficult for me to unpick the cask strength nostalgia that I feel for Rover alley with how good of a game it actually is but I will say that I would love the opportunity to revisit this I would love if someone could release a new edition of rubber I mean that captures some of the magic that the original edition have when it was an award-winning game and maybe who knows maybe I'll get that opportunity in the future thank you very much for watching everybody we have other videos I don't usually ramble about nonsense from my childhood at the end of them there's proof you can watch these they don't have me talking about my childhood in them that's guaranteed it's stamp it's seal of approval no childhood

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 235,535

Rating: 4.9675441 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, The Quest for El Dorado

Id: qYVBJ2u4xWI

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2019