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Let’s face it, if a game promises cults, madness and a big creepy pyramid in the middle of the table, I’m already at least a little bit interested. The Old Ones of El Dorado takes the old “lost city of gold” story and throws the gold out of the window. What people are really chasing here is immortality. Which honestly feels way more on-brand for a bunch of obsessed cult leaders.
You and the other players all help build a shared temple for Cthulhu, but at the same time you each run your own private sanctum for a different elder god. So you are working together and against each other at the same time, which is exactly as awkward as it sounds. You score points by building the temple, doing rituals, crafting masks, moving around a village and, of course, sacrificing people. You know, normal eurogame stuff.
Once someone hits 30 points, the end of the game starts ticking. Everyone gets one more round to squeeze out whatever they can, and then we see which cult was the best at pleasing some very grumpy gods.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 60-120 minutes
📝 Designer: Bruno Liguori Sia
🎨 Artwork: Jacqui Davis
🏢 Publisher: Dranda Games (preview copy provided)
Check out The Old Ones of El Dorado on Kickstarter
Gameplay overview
Most of the game lives in these action rows everyone plays with. On your turn you do one simple thing. You either place a worker card from your hand into a row, or you take all the cards from a row into your hand.
After that you run through that whole row, activating the symbols on the cards and then the action at the end of the row. Rows slowly grow over time, so every card you add makes that row stronger. Of course that also makes it more tempting for someone else to steal it. So you are always thinking: do I make this better, or do I grab it now before someone else does.
Each worker card has two sides. One is the physical world and the other is the other-lands. When you place a card, you choose which side is on top. That choice decides which symbols will fire first, so it matters more than it looks at first.
Your little keeper figure walks along the row as you resolve it, stepping from card to card and triggering the symbols it passes. Those symbols give you resources, let you move tracks, build things, or mess with parts of the board.
From the physical world you mostly get stuff. Stone, clay, gold, villagers and followers. Clay and gold can be turned into masks. Those masks are used for rituals and also score points at the end. Stone goes into the big shared temple in the middle. Villagers and followers end up in your sanctum or on the sacrifice tracks, depending on how dark your cult is feeling that day.
The other-lands are where most of the interesting things happen.
Worship lets you place masks or sacrifice people in your sanctum, flipping tiles and covering plinths that give points later.
Sculpt lets you spend clay or gold to build eldritch tablets, which give points and extra effects when you finish them.
Demand moves your collector around the village map, triggering locations and sometimes giving points.
Build lets you put stone into the shared temple for a steady two points. You also compete for majorities on each temple level. After a level is scored, all the stones go back to their owners, so every layer turns into a new little fight.
Sacrifice puts a villager or follower on the edge of the temple and moves you up a track that gives powers and endgame points.
Every action spot also has a small favour queue next to it. When you finish using a spot, your keeper waits there. When someone else later uses that same spot, anyone already waiting there may get a bonus action from a favour token. If the active player placed a card, that bonus is free. If they took a row, everyone in the queue also gets a madness token. So yeah, sometimes helping your opponents comes with a headache.
When the game ends, you score extra points for masks in your row, for sets of three basic resources, for what you built in your sanctum, and for how far you went on the sacrifice tracks. Madness, sadly or luckily, is worth nothing.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Just a quick reminder, we played a prototype. Things will look cleaner in the final version, but this already showed us what the game is aiming for.
The table presence is great. The main board is divided into different parts, and in the middle sits this three-level cardboard pyramid that slowly grows during the game. It’s very much the star of the table, which is fitting, because everyone is staring at it all the time anyway.
Around it you have the action rows, the village, the sacrifice tracks and the favour queues. Once you get used to it, it’s readable, but during the first game it feels like you are looking at some kind of ancient cult blueprint. Which, to be fair, you kind of are.
The player pieces are mostly wooden and chunky. You have keepers, collectors and lots of stone blocks for the temple. Your personal sanctum board slowly fills up with masks, tiles are flipped, and by the end it really does look like some messy altar that has seen a lot of strange rituals.
There are a lot of tokens. Masks, madness, village markers, favour tokens. It’s not minimal at all, but the icons are clear and after a while you stop thinking about it.
The worker cards look very thematic and split into two illustrated halves. You get cultists, ruins, rituals and weird cosmic stuff. It fits the theme well and helps you remember which side is which.
Overall it looks busy, dark and a bit chaotic. Which, honestly, feels about right.
Our experience
What we noticed right away is that most of the tension comes from timing, not from attacking each other. Those action rows feel like shared projects. You add a card, the row gets better, and then someone else might grab it. That leads to a lot of “maybe one more card… okay maybe not” moments.
Good turns can turn into long chains. You start on a worker card, move to the action spot, trigger something in your sanctum, maybe finish a tablet, maybe move on a track. When it works, it feels great. When it doesn’t, you sit there wondering why you didn’t just take the row last turn.
The favour queues are where a lot of the table talk happens. You often profit from what other people do, and sometimes you even want them to go to a certain action. But when madness starts flying around, suddenly that free help feels less free.
The choice between placing and taking rows gets weirdly personal. Taking a row gives people madness, so it’s a bit like poking everyone else with a stick. We had several turns where someone took a row mainly to make someone else miserable. Very thematic. Very petty.
Being able to skip symbols on worker cards, action spots or tablets to remove madness is a small rule, but it matters a lot. Sometimes the best move really is to do nothing just to clear your head. Relatable, honestly.
The big temple in the middle keeps pulling you in. Building is simple and gives steady points, so it’s always tempting. A few of our games came down to one last stone or one last sacrifice in the final round, which made the ending feel tense instead of just mechanical.
And yes, sometimes you take a row you don’t even want, just so someone else can’t have it. That kind of denial happens a lot, and it created some very loud table moments.
Our thoughts
The game works because everything is tied together. The action rows, the two-sided cards, the favour queues, the shared temple and your private sanctum all push on each other. You never feel like you’re playing in your own little bubble.
The shared action rows are the heart of it. You are constantly building things that other people can use, which creates interaction without anyone throwing cards in your face. Because the cards have two sides, you’re not just playing your turn, you’re also deciding what options everyone will have later.
The game doesn’t really reward doing a bit of everything. If you go into sculpting, you need clay and gold. If you focus on worship, you need masks and sacrifices. If you want to run around the village, you need to invest in that. And the sacrifice tracks make sure you can’t ignore anything completely, because only the lower one scores.
The place vs take choice is where most of the tension sits. Taking rows is strong but spreads madness, which slows people down. At four players this gets especially spicy.
If you like medium-weight euros with shared systems, engine building and a lot of indirect interaction, this one is probably worth a look. If you want something quick and friendly, this is not that. These gods do not care about your feelings.
For us, it was messy, tense, sometimes annoying and often very fun. Which is kind of the perfect mix for a game about cults and madness, if you think about it.
👉 The Old Ones of El Dorado launches on Kickstarter on 12 January.
📝 We played a prototype copy from Dranda Games.
