The Quest for El Dorado is a game we really enjoy, so its dice-based counterpart had a lot to live up to. We were curious to see how Reiner Knizia had translated the journey through the jungle onto player sheets and replaced cards with dice. The goal remains familiar—reach the legendary city before your rivals. This time, however, we mark our route with a pencil, and the success of our expedition depends on the available dice results and the supplies we have prepared along the way.
There’s a good chance that Dominion from Rio Grande Games has caught your eye, or that you’ve even played it. It’s a classic example of a game built around the deck-building mechanic and is widely considered one of the genre’s flagship titles. The same publisher has another game in its portfolio that strongly resembles Dominion—at least in many aspects, it repeats the mechanics that made it such a great game. The key difference is that this time, instead of building a deck, we build dice that we roll every turn. That game is Dice Realms. It sounds great. Let’s see whether it actually delivers.