The Quest for El Dorado is a highly regarded, family-friendly deck-building race game where players compete as rival expedition leaders charting a path through the dense, unforgiving jungles and treacherous waters of South America in search of the legendary city of gold. Each player starts with a small, identical deck of cards representing basic actions like moving through specific terrain types or earning money to buy better cards, but as the game progresses, they strategically acquire new, more powerful cards from a central market to customize their deck, allowing them to overcome challenging terrain spaces more efficiently, all with the ultimate goal of being the first to cross the finish line and reach El Dorado.