Quacks of Quedlinburg: Second Opinion

In The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you take on the role of quack doctors all making their own remedy potions to sell at the annual Quedlinburg Bazaar, an event held over 9 days. Each day you brew a new potion by drawing ingredients at random from your bag in hopes of creating the best potion, but beware too many of a certain ingredient will cause your pot to explode. Do you keep pushing your luck in the hopes of creating the best potion or play it safe in hopes of gathering better ingredients for a later day's potions? Who will be revealed as the best quack doctor? who will risk it all in hopes of greater glory? There’s only one way to find out.

Basic Gameplay Overview

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is played over 9 rounds, in each round players will blindly draw tokens out of their potion bag to play on their personal pot game board. How far around the potion track you managed to get with your ingredients decides how many victory points you collect and how much money you have to spend on new ingredients for that round.

Each player starts the game with the same set-up as one another, these include a pot personal board with two sides, a flask, multiple player tokens, and a potion bag with 9 starting ingredient chips put into it.

At the start of every round, the starting player reveals the top card of the shuffled fortune-teller deck, this has a modifier for this round and can change rules or conditions for the round or even give you items like ingredient chips and gems.

Then every player simultaneously starts blindly pulling ingredient chips out of their bag, each of these chips comes in one of eight different colours with your bag containing chips of three different colours at the start of the game. Each different colour chip has a different ability and comes in varying values. While drawing from the bag you need to be aware of the total value of the white chips you have pulled, if at any time the total value of the white chips in your pot exceeds 7 then your potions explode, so sometimes pulling another chip can be a risk.

Once everyone has decided to stop pulling chips from their bag or has been forced to by their pot exploding you figure out who made it along their potion track the furthest and they get to roll a bonus die. After that, you check if anyone had any bonuses from green, purple, or black chips. Next, you look at the space after your last chip, if this has a ruby icon every player with that icon takes a ruby.

The next step varies depending on whether the player blew up their pot or not. If they blew up their pot they have to choose between victory points and money to spend on new ingredients, if the player didn’t blow up they get to take both. Victory points are tracked on the shared main board, you move your marker the number of points shown in the parchment square on the space after your last chip. Money is the green number shown in the same space, these can be spent at the ingredient market where you can buy up to two ingredient chips of different colours.

Finally the last step you can spend two rubies to either refresh your flask if it was used or move your starting droplet token one space along the potion track on your board. Then return all ingredient chips including your new purchases to your potion bag and prepare for the next round.

How It Plays

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a lot of fun. The core gameplay of individually pushing your luck but doing it all at the same time makes for fun conversation while also sitting there trying to remember what is left in your bag attempting to figure out what are the chances you don’t explode your pot is and if you want to take that chance.

The pool building for the chips in your bag is not weighed down with complexity allowing for a quick and easy market phase where players of any experience in both the game and in pool building mechanism in general can figure it out very quickly so it shouldn’t slow down the game too much.

Now on to how this game compares between a two-player game and a four-player game? On the surface very similar because most of the actions in this game do not affect other players, you are pulling from your bag and placing ingredients on your board, if you explode it doesn't do anything to other players. Some ingredients get you benefits based on players next to you, the occasional fortuneteller card will have something to do with how well other players do, and the catch-up mechanism is based on other players, but there is no way to purposely affect another player's board or actions.

There were two main differences I did notice between the games. The first was the market, in a two-player game, the limited number of each ingredient was never really an issue no matter how many of each we bought. However in a four-player game, we ran out of one and came close on a couple of others, it seemed we all liked the ability of the blue chips and found that the blue 2 was the easiest to acquire. When we started to notice they were getting low it just led to us increasing purchasing it till it ran out and was no longer an option.

The other main difference was the conversation when drawing out of our bags, with four players it felt like we were all drawing at different times and joking about what we got or if we should risk it, but with two players it felt like we were more concentrating on our draws and talking between rounds, that might be just us but in a game with limited player interaction I was glad with the four-player group there was still constant conversation.

Another thing I would like to mention is there are ways to vary this game, the ingredient cards come in sets and you can use a different one of these four sets every time you play as well as a variant side of the board so the replayability is very high with this game.