The core of this game takes two minutes to learn, and then four or five rules cause every argument anyone has ever had at the table. This page is about those: when a cave is actually explored, what a blockade does and does not let you ignore, why two small cards cannot be added together, and how a tie is broken.
It is written from the rules specification behind Gold City, a free browser game built on the same idea — a deck-building race across hex terrain. Where our version deliberately plays something differently from the printed 2017 Ravensburger game, it is marked like this and listed in full at the end. Buy the physical game — it is excellent.
Try the rules in a real game — free, no signupEveryone owns an identical, deliberately feeble deck of eight cards — four that provide coins, three that cut jungle, one that paddles — and draws a hand of four. The map is a path of hex spaces from the starting line to a gate at the far end, and the first expedition through the gate wins.
A turn is three steps, in this order, and never any other:
That is the whole engine. The interesting part is that your movement is your deck: every card you buy will come round again, and every weak starting card you fail to get rid of will also come round again, at the worst moment.
See a turn played out in the illustrated rulebook →Three symbols, three kinds of ground. Green jungle wants a machete card, blue river wants a paddle, yellow villages want coins. White cards are jokers and count as any one of the three, chosen as you play them. Each space is printed with a number: the strength required to enter it.
To enter a space you play exactly one card, whose symbol matches the ground and whose number is at least the space's cost. This is the rule that gets broken at every first game: you may not add two machete-1 cards together to enter a jungle-2. If you cannot meet the cost with a single card, you cannot go there. Nothing in the game ever lets you pool strength across cards for one space.
The rest of a card, though, is yours to keep walking with. Play a machete-3 into a jungle-1 and you have 2 left; spend it on further adjacent spaces of the same kind, one at a time, as far as it reaches. The moment you stop that card — by playing any other card, by buying something, or by ending your turn — the remainder evaporates. It is not saved and it is not transferable.
Two absolute limits: mountains can never be entered, and you can never move onto a space that already has a pawn on it, including your own in the two-player game.
See the no-combining rule drawn out, with cards →Two kinds of ground ignore symbols entirely and count cards:
| Space | Cost | What happens to the cards |
|---|---|---|
| Grey rubble | Discard N cards of any kind, where N is the printed number | Discarded normally — they come back |
| Red base camp | Also N cards of any kind | Removed from the game. They never come back |
The base camp is the best deck-thinning tool in the game and most new players walk around it. Feeding it your four starting coin-1 cards is often worth more than the space you gained. Note that these costs are paid in card count, not strength: four machete-6 cards clear a rubble-4 exactly as well as four starting cards do, and far more wastefully.
See rough ground paid in cards →The map is built from several pieces, and where two pieces meet a blockade is laid across the join. There are six of them in the box, and the important thing about a blockade is what it seals: not a single space, but the entire seam. Every crossing between those two map pieces is barred, so there is no walking around the end of it.
The first player to cross pays the blockade's requirement exactly as if it were a space — one card, matching symbol, big enough number — and then three things happen at once: they take the piece and keep it, the barrier is gone for everybody, and whatever strength was left on that card can still be spent walking on. A machete-3 that paid a machete-1 blockade has 2 left and may keep going.
A blockade is a barrier in the gap between spaces — it is not a space. So effects that let you ignore a space's requirement do not apply to it. The card that steps you onto any adjacent space regardless of cost, and the cave token that does the same, both stop dead at an intact blockade: it still has to be paid for with a matching card.
This matters more than it sounds, because getting it wrong turns one mid-priced card into a free pass through a machete-6 and hands over a tiebreak piece. We had it the other way round in an early draft and it was wrong.
In our version the pieces are not numbered 1–6. Each one carries a tiebreak value of 1–4 points, rolled when the map is generated, and printed on the piece along with what it costs to cross. Ties are settled on the total, below.
See a blockade paid, with the leftover carried on →The caves variant scatters face-down token piles on cave-marked mountains — thirty-six tokens, four to a pile. Draw one and you keep it indefinitely, playing it at any point during any of your later turns, after which it leaves the game. They are small favours: an extra symbol to spend, a card or two drawn, a card trashed, a whole hand swapped, permission to walk through an occupied space, or a step that ignores the ground's requirement.
The timing is the whole rule, and it is where the arguments start. You explore a cave when you come to a stop beside one, at the end of a card's movement. Sweeping past a cave in the middle of a chain gives you nothing — only where the card's movement actually finishes counts.
Three consequences worth knowing before someone claims otherwise:
In our version caves are on by default rather than being an advanced variant, because the game is more interesting with them and a browser game can shuffle thirty-six tokens for free.
See the stop-beside-a-cave timing drawn out →The market is rows of piles, each pile a stack of copies of one card. On your turn you may buy at most one card, and the purchase ends your turn's movement — you cannot buy something and then walk on. Buying in the middle of a card's movement forfeits whatever was left on it, which is a real cost, so buy last on purpose rather than by accident.
What your cards are worth when you spend them as money:
Add up as much as you like, buy one card whose cost you can meet, and lose the change. The card you buy goes to your discard pile, not your hand: it arrives after your next shuffle, which is exactly why buying strong cards early is worth more than it looks and buying them late is worth almost nothing.
One access rule that surprises people: while any market slot is empty, you may buy any remaining card type, including the ones waiting off to the side, and it moves onto the empty slot when you do. In our version the piles are four deep rather than three, measured rather than guessed: at three copies, four competitive players simply buy the supply out, and a player whose route demands a card that no longer exists has nowhere to shop.
See a purchase go to the discard pile →Purple cards do something instead of moving you — draw cards, trash cards, take a card from the market for free, step onto an adjacent space ignoring its requirement — and then your turn continues normally.
Some cards are items: once you use their function, they are removed from the game rather than discarded. That is the price of a very strong effect, and it is one-way. The subtlety: an item played without using its function — thrown in as half a coin toward a purchase, or as one of the bodies for a rubble space — is only discarded, and will come round again.
See the card types, with real faces →Reaching a finishing space triggers the final round: the arriving pawn passes through the gate, and every other player takes exactly one more turn. If the player who arrives first is the last in turn order, the game simply ends there.
An arrived pawn is out of play. It does not move again for any reason — not for a card, not for a token — even though its owner's turn carries on and may still have strength in hand. It also stops blocking anybody: the space it stood on is free.
In our version, ties are settled on blockade points: add up the values on the pieces you claimed, and the highest total wins. If the totals are equal — including the case where nobody bothered with a single blockade — the tied players share the victory. Arrival order never breaks a tie. The printed game runs a different ladder here; ours is deliberate, and it makes the blockades worth crossing rather than worth avoiding.
See the walk-in through the gate →With two players each of you runs two pawns, and both of them have to reach the gate before you have won anything. Each card you play is assigned to one pawn — strength may never be split across the pair — and all four pawns block all four pawns, including your own two. It is a different game from the four-player race: much more about route planning, much less about who gets to the blockade first.
These are the variations we settled on after playing and measuring. Nothing stops you using them at a physical table.
The Golden Temples expansion changes the goal. Instead of racing straight for the gate you must collect a gem from each of two temples first, and the chamber at the end stays sealed until you hold them — so the fastest route is no longer the shortest one. It also adds an orange torch symbol (a fourth kind of ground, which makes jokers four-way), loose gold coins you can hoard up to a small cap and spend either as a single step or toward a purchase, and face-down guardians on impassable hexes that go off when you stop beside them.
In our version this layer exists on generated maps as the combined game only, with the guardian effects that can resolve without asking other players to make choices. It is not switchable on in the lobby yet.
Every deliberate departure from the printed game, in one place, because a rules page that quietly changed the rules would be worse than no rules page:
| Rule | Printed game | Gold City |
|---|---|---|
| Entering the gate | Costs a card like any space | Free — a pawn beside the gate walks in, even with an empty hand. A blockade in the gap must still be paid |
| Blockade pieces | Numbered, used as an ordering | Worth 1–4 tiebreak points, rolled when the map is generated |
| Tied finish | Broken by a ladder ending in arrival order | Highest blockade points; equal totals share the victory |
| Caves | A variant for experienced players | On by default; switchable off in the lobby |
| Market piles | Three copies of each type | Four, so a four-player game cannot buy the supply out |
| Maps | Printed tiles arranged into set routes | Generated from a seed, scored for difficulty, and rerollable — the same seed always builds the same map |
| Undo | Whatever the table agrees | None. A committed action stands; only an unresolved prompt can be taken back |
The rest — the symbols, the no-combining rule, leftover strength, rubble and base camps, cave timing, one purchase per turn, the final round — is played as the printed game plays it, as far as we can establish it.
Play a game and see — free, no signupGold City home · Play El Dorado board game online · The illustrated in-game rulebook
Gold City is an independent game inspired by The Quest for El Dorado. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by Ravensburger or Reiner Knizia.