Quacks Of Quedlinburg

10th March 2020

​Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns in Woking with the Gaming Club.

The first game of the evening was 'Quacks of Quedlinburg'.
Quacks of QuedlinBurg is not a game about ducks as I thought when I first heard the name.
It's actually a push your luck game about disreputable, dangerous, deplorable and downright dishonest doctors. Actually YOU play the quacks in question trying to create the most amazing and wondrous potions. Amazing and wondrous that is, until they blow up in your face.

What's in a game?
Quacks of Quedlinburg has quite a few components, there is a game board and personal game boards. There are also tokens - and lots of them too, as they are the most important component of the game.

• Game board: The main game board tracks player scores and also tracks the current number of rounds in the game.
• Personal game board: The personal game board is designed to look like a pot filled with a swirling liquid that's just been vigorously stirred, there's a scoring track the follows the lines of the swirling that tracks how many victory points and coins they earn in a round. There're also spots for other components. This board is double-sided for an alternate play style.
• Flasks: There is a flask tile for each player, they are shaped like bottles and are double sided. One side shows the flask as filled, the other as empty.

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Potion pot board at game start.

Front of flask tile.

Player bag with a few starting tokens.

Rear of flask tile.

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• Bags: There is a bag for each player.
• Player tokens: Each player receives a rat token and a droplet in their colour. These tokens are made of plastic and are quite chunky.
• Rubies: These are made of translucent acrylic and are 'crystal shaped'  .
• Ingredient tiles. These are used to represent different ingredients that players may gain access to. There are 22 different types of ingredient, depicted in 7 different colours. There are 4 ingredients for yellow, green, red, blue and purple (Arranged in 4 sets of 5 with 1 of each colour). There is 1 black and 1 orange ingredient.
• Ingredient tokens: There tokens for each colour of ingredient (Not type of ingredient.), there are numbered; 1, 2, or 4.  There are also white ingredient tokens numbered 1, 2 or 3.
• Bonus die: A six sided die, but with the numbers replaced by symbols.
• Fortune Teller Cards: A deck of 24 cards that give a one-off bonus when drawn at the start of the round.

The components are all of a good quality. The artwork is colourful and well drawn.
​That the player boards look like pots, flask tiles look like potion bottles and ingredient tiles look like ingredient books shows that some thought, effort and care has been put into the their design. ​

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The main game board and the bonus die.

Ingredient tiles, tokens & fortune teller cards.

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How's it play?
​Setup.

• Set up the ingredients for the game. The black and orange ingredients are used in every game. 1 of the 4 sets (Of 5 ingredients.) is chosen and used as well. Some sets are more 'difficult' to use than others.
• Put out the black and orange ingredient tiles, along with their respective tokens. Then put out the green, red and blue ingredient tiles along with their respective tokens. Put the yellow and purple tiles and tokens to one side for now.
• Shuffle the fortune teller cards and place them down in a face-down stack.
• Give each player a player board (Pot.), a flask tile, a rat token and droplet token. The flask and the rat token go on to their respective spots on the player board. The droplet token goes on to the '0' spot on the scoring track.
• Next give each player a bag, 1 orange token, 1 green token and 7 white tokens (The white tokens consist of 4x1 point tokens, 2x2 point tokens and 1x3 point token.). All of the tokens are placed into the player's bag, which is thoroughly shaken.

Now we're ready to begin.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is played over 9 rounds and something new or different is introduced over several of the rounds.

• At the start of round 2, the yellow ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 3, the purple ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 6, each player must add another 1 point white token into their bag.

Now, this is how the first 8 rounds are played.

• ​First a card is drawn from the fortune teller deck and it's action is carried out.
• From round 2 onwards: Determine if players get 'rat-tails' to put into their pot! There are a number of 'rat symbols' on the scoring track on the main board. Every symbol between the player and every other player, means that the other player may place their rat token a space further along the track on their own board, giving them a head start for the round. Essentially a balancing mechanic.
• Then simultaneously, each player begins blindly drawing ingredient tokens, one at a time from their bag and placing them on the scoring track on their board (Starting at the droplet token, 0 at the game start.). The number on the token determines where it goes: If it's a 1, it goes on to the 1st available spot, a 2 goes on the 2nd available spot and so on. Some ingredient tokens have special actions triggered when placed, these actions are carried out immediately.
• Players may continue drawing and placing tokens until either; they choose to stop or they go 'bust'. A player goes bust when the white tokens they drew have a combined value that exceeds 7 (Potion goes boom!).

Once all players have either stopped adding ingredients or have gone bust, play goes on to the next 6 phases.

• In turn order, players who did not go bust can roll the bonus die and acquires whatever bonus the die rolls. Players that went bust skip this phase.
• Some tokens have actions that are triggered in this phase, carry these actions out now, in turn order.
• Players may earn a ruby, depending on where they finished on their scoring track.
• Players who did not go bust score victory points depending on where they finished on their scoring track. Players who went bust, must choose whether to earn victory points or earn coins (See below.).
• Players who did not go bust earn points according to their finishing spot. Players who went bust choose either to earn coins or victory points. Coins can now be spent to buy more ingredients which are added to their bag. Coins cannot be carried over from round to round, use 'em or lose 'em!
• Finally, players may spend rubies to either move their droplet forward on their board (Thus moving their starting spot forward.) or to refill their flask it they used it. 

What the flask does?
When players are drawing ingredients from their bag. They can use their flask to return the token to the bag - provided they had not gone bust because of the token.

Endgame
Play continues normally until the start of the 9th round.
The final round is a little different.

When drawing a token from their bags, each player keeps the token in a closed hand and every player opens their hand at the same time. When a player wants to stop drawing tokens they simply keep their empty hand closed until it's time to reveal it. After that they drop out of further rounds of drawing ingredients.

The phases for spending coins on ingredients and rubies on the droplet/flask are ignored because they are pointless at the end of the game.
Instead; every 5 coins and/or 2 rubies will earn the player a victory point.

After this, victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Game end.

Player game board at game end.

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Overall
Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fairly easy game to learn and easy to play. It moves along briskly too as there's very little downtime and it doesn't outstay its welcome as it's finished after 9 rounds. When I played it, it felt like a lot was occurring in a short game time.

Pulling ingredients out a bag to put into a pot is a brilliant use of the 'push your luck' mechanic. It fits the game perfectly and surprisingly makes it a lot of fun.

Additionally; unlike most 'push your luck' games, going bust does not totally kill a player's turn, they still reap some of rewards of their potion making and they can still carry out most of the other actions.

The engine building mechanic works well too, as players introduce tokens into their bags, it makes going bust a little harder, giving players longer more productive turns.

Combined, the 2 game mechanics always gives the player meaningful and interesting decisions to make, when to and when not to push your luck? What ingredients to buy? And so on.

I liked it and will definitely play it again.