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At heart, Wettlauf nach El Dorado is a racing game in which deck-building is just a fancy way for you to adjust how you make your way through the forests, over the waterways, and across the villages that separate you from the fabled land of El Dorado — although anyone who knows their Donald Duck will recall that El Dorado actually refers to a golden man, not a golden land.
Many modern games take longer than the listed playing time the first time you attempt them because you're trying to fit together all the rules in your mind and are stumbling around unsure of what to do. If you charted the playing times over multiple sessions, you'd have a decreasing graph that flatlines at a certain point once everyone is familiar with the rules.
For me, Knizia games follow a different pattern, with the initial gameplay going quickly because it feels like not much is going on, but as you go through the game again and again, you find the possibilities of gameplay opening up to you, realizing that more opportunities exist for clever plays than you initially realized. If you charted out those playing times, you'd have a bell curve representing the simplicity of the rule set in the early stages, the rising middle of "a-ha" moments as you discover how to think ahead more and play better, then the decreasing section when the game is familiar and comforting, one more classic that you anticipate playing for years.
Wettlauf nach El Dorado falls into that category of Knizia classics for me. As much as I enjoy Kingdomino, which I've played a fair amount with my son and others and which gives a quick burst of thinky puzzling and playing the odds, and Magic Maze, which is a heady group experience but not one I anticipate playing with the same people over and over again in the years ahead, Wettlauf nach El Dorado is what I'd choose for Spiel des Jahres, for a game to introduce to others to challenge them and give them something that they'll want to return to over and over again.
By chance, I sat with representatives from Ravensburger at a dinner during the Spielwarenmesse game fair in February 2017, and one of the many topics we discussed was the shortening of shelf times in the German and U.S. game markets. Hundreds of new games are introduced each year, and most of those games will vanish from publisher catalogs in a few seasons, replaced by other designs that aren't necessarily better than what came before but are only different and new. One of the developers explained how many hours they had put into Wettlauf nach El Dorado, hoping that it would become one of the few evergreen titles that survive in the catalog for a handful of years, but content to do the work anyway because this was a game that they were publishing for themselves as much as anyone else. We're all gamers here, he said, so sometimes you do the work and hope for the best.
Here's hoping...
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