The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a push your luck bag builder. Each player starts with a standard set of tokens comprised of various ingredients: cherry bombs, a spider, and a pumpkin. It is your job as the next quack to populate your bag with the most strategic tokens. From your ingredient bag you will pull tokens at random to progress through your pot (your player board). You will earn points by filling your pot. Watch out though, pull too many cherry bombs and KAPOW! your pot explodes and it's time to make a decision; do I take the victory points or spend my money to get tokens?
Each round has multiple phases and there are nine rounds in total.
Phase 1: the fortune teller card gets pulled by the start player. Follow the directions on the card, we found they were usually helpful bonuses.
Phase 2: pull your ingredient tokens from your bag and place them along the spiral. You decide when to stop (before it explodes or after, just depends on what you pulled).
Phase 3: reconcile special tokens, rubies, points, and money.
Phase 4: if you are able, buy tokens to supplement your bag.
Phase 5: move the round marker and start again.
After playing through the game five times, with different book sets and therefore slightly different interpretations of the values of the tokens, we sat down and talked about our experiences with the game.
Spider: I feel like it would be more fun if you could take turns drawing your tokens, but I see how that would make the game take way too long. There was some tension about whether or not my pot would explode (cherry bombs etc.), but there wasn’t really any tension between me and Cat. The tension was partitioned and private because you’re pulling tokens on your own and then when everyone was done and compared boards to see the highest rank. The only round where there was simultaneous pulling was the last round. I found this lack of tension between players odd in a push your luck game. It made the game less exciting than I thought it would be. I felt like the game took the one mechanism they employed (push your luck) and neutered it because it was a solitaire experience.
If you compare to a blackjack experience, there’s a collective set of eyes on your moment of decision to push your luck, that wasn’t present in Quacks. I actually really like the mechanism and the theme was very entertaining. The game artwork was very detailed, the ingredient tokens did fade a bit after just five plays. I liked the catch-up mechanism with the rat tails. The game is not meant to be serious, so I didn’t have that pressure, it just felt a very solitary experience. With two players, there was no presence of a take-that mentality.
I honestly thought it was a good game, but the lack of tension made it kinda boring. Everything I look for in the game was there, except the excitement. I ended the games feeling bored. I should love this game; it has the integrated theme, it had great physical components, it had the catchup mechanism, and everything swirled back to the main mechanism of push your luck. The lack of tension was the thing that made me lose favor.
Cat: Well, I found out that I do not like push your luck mechanism. I tried to think rationally about the probability aspect of padding my ingredient bag with more tokens so that there was less of a chance of pulling a cherry bomb. Despite my efforts in the those early play throughs I consistently pulled the stinking cherry bombs. More often than not I pushed my luck too far and then I was positioned to either take the victory points or get more tokens. Initially, I opted to get more tokens to increase my chances of success, but after a few games it just felt annoying. I kept pulling the darn cherry bombs and I usually exploded.
As we played through the different playbook sets I was able to find more success by optimizing which tokens I purchased according to what their values were at the time. This helped a little in the helplessness feeling. However, after awhile I just got frustrated exploding my pot early every round and watching Spider continue on. The main benefit of not exploding was getting to keep both victory points and potion money to buy more ingredients. There was also the bonus dice for the highest scoring person that didn’t explode. I rarely got the chance to roll because I exploded so much.
I really liked the tactile nature of the game; the tokens, the bag, the rubies, the point markers, the rat tokens. It had a lot of different components that brought a deeper experience. There were a number of moving parts in the game and I felt that a reference card would have been helpful. There is artwork on the boards that is helpful, but I do like having a personal reference card to hold to help regulate the flow. With two novice players, it was easy to forget a step or do things out of order.
Pros:
Theme
Components
Quick playtime
Catchup mechanism
Variety with book sets increases re-playability
Easy to teach
Cons:
Long set-up time
Lack of tension in push your luck
Spider: Two Spiders
Cat: Two Cats
Rating Scale
Would not buy or play again
Would not buy but would play again
Would buy and play again, but only occasionally
Would buy and play again in normal rotation