Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo Preview
Regular visitors to this website might have a vague memory of me mentioning the game Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo as one of the games to check out at the UK Games Expo 2024.
Well, my enthusiasm for the game lead to the designer reaching out and sending me a more finished prototype ahead of its Essen Spiel release in October 2024. The good news is that I have now played it lots and am happy to enthusiastically share the following…
Oh one last thing before you go further, just be aware that I’ve played and photographed a prototype and so components, gameplay and the like may well change.
More about the game
Well you might be surprised to hear that the game uses the story of Don Quixote as its backdrop! While I knew of the yarn, I wasn’t overly familiar with the story. Its also a book that has very little in the way of a short synopsis available, but from what I gather, the lowly main character decides to embark on chivalrous endeavours.
Over the course of the game, you will play just eight turns. Playing cards that relate to Quixote’s personality traits of love, glory, delusion and obsession to influence the character. On each of the eight turns the active player will choose an adventure card. This will display two traits on it with a value of how many steps along the central board these traits would take if successful. Players then choose a card to vote on the outcome of the adventure, either in a positive or negative way.
Players will use their hand of cards to vote for which trait will win. Some cards have the ability to zap (remove the vote from another card), some cards will not be able to be zapped, and others will grant their owner a powerful object or scoring gem.
The idea being that you manipulate the traits on the central board to help meet your private objectives. At the same time you need to pay attention to which scoring zone the traits are in, as this will be the score multiplier for the cards you have played during the voting stages. I think I’ve managed to make that sound more complicated than it is!
Final thoughts on Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo
The tight amount of turns creates some tense gameplay and puts the focus on the strategy from the first turn. The more you play, the more this strategy comes to the fore. Weighing up point scoring while meeting objective provides a lovely strategy of what cards to use for voting and when to use them.
For me, the artwork which does include some AI, is a little mixed and some characters jolt with others. When discussing this with the designer I discovered that this was intentional and some of the more serious characters in the book have more realistic artwork, while some of the characters involved in more comic endeavours are illustrated thusly. I’m not sure it works for me but I am less familiar with the books so I could be in the minority. The other aesthetic thing I wasn’t so sure on is that the adventure cards have snippets from the book on them, I understand why, however I think just the headings and not the sub-text would’ve sufficed. It just takes up quite a lot of the card which I think may have been better served with displaying the cool art bigger.
Overall, I have been very pleasantly surprised by Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo. My family have all enjoyed it too. So we cannot wait to see the final version! If you are heading to Essen or see it elsewhere on your travels, be sure to check it out!
