I thought that The Quacks of Quedlinburg might be the first game that I get off my shelf to play from my un-played games. You can see the full list of un-played here. And I knew I had a friend coming over yesterday that’d be up for learning a new game. So Quacks was the one I decided to pull out.

How To Play Quacks of Quedlinburg

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a bag building push your luck game. You are a quack doctor who is putting together a potion. But if you get too much of the wrong ingredient in there, it is going to explode. You start out with mainly the wrong ingredient and then as rounds progress, you buy more ingredients to add to your bag. You decide, though, when you want to stop pulling out more ingredients.

The game really shines in the different books that you have. Basically books that determine what different ingredients do. So as you buy different ingredients you can start coming up with a lot of different strategies. Some of them are static, orange pumpkins are always just 1, purple and black scale with players but are consistent cross games. The rest of them, they can be different and you play certain sets of them.

In the end, it is the person who gets the most points that is the winner. And I’ll talk about some more specifics in things that work or don’t work as well.

What Doesn’t Work?

This is a pretty straightforward game. I don’t think that I’ve figured out a combination yet on anything yet, though. But for some gamers, this is going to be a little bit too straight forward. So I wonder with the combinations that I have if I’m going to want more of them? Or less so will I want to play more, I likely will, but will I want to play them over and over again? Is it solvable even with the push your luck element?

But I really don’t have much that I don’t see messing up this game. The push your luck, if you’re risk adverse might be a turn off for some people as well. But the basics of it, and how you bust, make the whole thing quite easy to understand what you have left and what you might pull.

What Does Work?

I really like the different powers of the different ingredients and the different combinations that you can have. Now they do come in groups, which makes sense, I’m sure that it is balanced per each group. But in the base box, that is three different groups. And some of the reason why I’m not doing a full review yet, is that I’ve only played with one of those groups thus far in my two plays. And I know that they’ve released bigger expansions, but it’d be easy enough to just release another set of these tiles to play with and add those in.

I also like how the incentivize the push your luck element. It’d be easy enough to just play it safe and stop early each time. But only the person who goes the furthest without having their pot explode rolls the bonus die. And not all things on the die are equal. Two points is objectively better than a pumpkin, but depending on your strategy, it might be similar. But it really does make a difference if you get that roll.

The rat tails are also a clever idea in the game. Basically, if someone drops behind in score, there are rat tails on the scoring track. However many they are behind the leader, they get to put a rat into their pot ahead that many spaces. It’s a nice catch-up mechanic that means even if you pull poorly and bust, next round you have a way to catch back up.

Finally, I like the fortune teller cards. When we pulled, they were basically all positive. Now, I can see some people not loving them, because some of them are a bit random. You draw out tokens and the high or low total gets one bonus, everyone else gets another. But it generally felt like they were good no matter what I got, which I appreciated. It’d have been a chance to do mean stuff to the players, and they didn’t seem to do that much.

Who Is This For?

When I played it, and some other games recently that I’ve gotten, it felt like a gateway game. And that isn’t a bad thing. But it did ask the question of myself, what gateway games might get replaced because of this? So I do think that if you have a lot of gateway games but play heavier, this might not be the game for you.

However, The Quacks of Quedlinburg is going to be a game for a lot of people. I think that just in the ingredients that you can buy there is enough variety for a more seasoned gamer to mess around with strategies. But the game play itself is simple enough that a new player will be able to pick it up.

What Do I Want To See in Quacks of Quedlinburg

Going forward, I want to play around with the other collections of books in there. There are three that I haven’t played with, so that’s a lot of variety. Plus, I want to see if it feels different with more players. The game play is generally solitaire. What I buy doesn’t change what you buy. But some of the ingredients, black actually, changes a bit on different players. And how does the rat mechanic feel with more players.

I also want to see how well it works for my game group. I have a few gateway games that I might put it over for myself. But is it going to be a game that my group likes. I could see a couple of players potentially being a bit more risk adverse and the game not working as well for them.

What are your thoughts, do you like The Quacks of Quedlinburg, do the expansions add stuff that’s worth getting?

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