LogFAQs > #933274191

72. Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Deck-building, push-your-luck, simultaneous action selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 3-4 sessions (2019) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is a quack medieval doctor randomly adding ingredients (chits, drawn from a bag) to their potion, which both increase the potion's marketability (giving gold to buy more ingredients, and victory points) but can also cause the potion to blow up (and therefore only award gold or VP, but not both). You get to choose when to stop drawing ingredients. The game ends after a fixed number of brewed potions.

Experience - As I see it, winning can have an outsized impact on people's enjoyment of a game. I've only won Quacks once, but it was the first time I played, and it did successfully make me want to play it more.

Design - Push-your-luck is a mechanism that distills the "yes -- yes -- NO!!!" or "ugh... YES!" sensation. Building a bag, like in Quacks, is the same process as building a deck. But unlike most deck-builders and even bag-builders, Quacks will never cycle through the whole bag. At the end of every round, the ingredients you bought go into your bag along with the ingredients you just drew to make your latest potion. So there's no guarantee you'll ever see any given potion you put into the bag. That type of luck can be frustrating but is a good reminder not to take the game too seriously.

There's a lot of fun stuff about how the game works, too. Real time drawing makes sense; it's largely a multiplayer solitaire other than the racing mechanic. To prevent an economic snowball, there's a minor (though arguably insufficient) catchup mechanic depending on your current VP count. There are lots of feels-good chits you can draw - a few of the basic ingredients have synergies with others, but possibly only when drawn in sequence, or preferably at the end, or preferably at the beginning. The track by which you measure your progress is fantastic: a spiral, where you start at the beginning and move gradually outward.

On the downside of Quacks, aside from luck, I'd say that building a giant, giant spiral is fun but arguably not as fun as it could be. It's a necessary evil, of course, but the victory points don't accelerate in any way as you get further into your potion. This is obviously in place to prevent runaway leaders by a single round of amazing luck, but it diminishes a bit from the adrenaline and keeps the stakes low when you're deep into your potion.

One important thing Quacks does to keep the game fun, in my view, is protect you from your own failures. In many push-your-luck games, busting once can obliterate your prospects. Quacks lets you keep either the gold or the VP when you bust, which is extremely forgiving.

Future - Quacks is a little long for a filler, and it's not particularly interactive, but its simultaneous play, whimsical theme, and fun mechanisms (not to mention relative recency and presence in my friends' library) make it a good candidate to hit the table again. With limited depth, though, I don't think it could realistically rise much higher.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness