Deckscape: Eldorado

I looked at this one for a while at the store before buying it.  Deckscape: the Mystery of Eldorado called itself an escape game in a single deck of cards, and I was curious how that would also work.  Another attraction was that it could be played solo.  

It turned out to be a deck that must be played from the first card to last without shuffling or peeking.  It also had a "secret" dossier that cannot be opened until the cards say to open it.  That's interesting, but is it playable?

With a lot of clever design work, yes, this was a fun little adventure.  The story is a very tired trope, but it packed a lot of puzzles and questions into the hour or so that it took to play.  It felt more like a "choose your own adventure" game than an escape room game.  There were a few places where the deck gets split into two or three sequences of cards, and technically different players could work on different parts of the story together.  As a cooperative game, the players all win or lose together.

 

We thought we could keep the deck in good order, just turning a few as we went along, but it branched out to the point where about a dozen cards were in play.  Two of the side quests ended up exposing clue cards.  And at one point you do need a monkey head.  I had some photos of the final mess, but since they show the solution sides to some of the cards, I won't spoil it for you.

All of the puzzles felt solvable, though two of them had really odd solutions we would never have thought of.  Overall, you get to choose from four items to take with you, and you may get stuck with certain effect cards along the way.  But there was a good variety of spatial puzzles, some cards where you choose among three or four things which end up giving interesting results when you flip the card.  The dossier had some notes and a map, but I don't want to spoil any of that for you.

There is a scoresheet you get to draw up on scrap paper.  Along the way you get one or two Zs if you fail a task.  I don't know why they chose the letter Z for that, but okay.  After 2 Zs you start to get Xs which represent injuries.  Other choices will heal Xs or Zs.  It all felt very well planned and balanced.  At the end there is a scoring system and you get a rank based on your score.  The biggest factor in scoring is how long it takes to reach the end, but since we don't like time pressure when we game, we ignored the score.  The important thing was that we cleared an unusual set of puzzles and only ended up with 2 Zs and a frog.

The only real downside is that there's not much room to replay the game now that we know most of the tricks.  Maybe if we stick it on a shelf for a year we'll forget where that silly symbol was, or how to put those two cards together near the end.  Or maybe not.

Who needs jealous gods when you've got a pen-munching mega cat?