Board Game Review: Quarriors!
It’s a board game, a deck building game, and a dice game. It’s the Swiss army knife of games. And it is awesome. Quarriors is a 2-4 player dice pool building game published by WizKids, that is pretty quick to play at around 30 minutes or so. For the full break down you can check out more from Board Game Geek here.
So exactly what is a dice pool building game you ask? Well imagine taking Dominion, Magic: the Gathering, a ton of dice, and the kitchen sink. You put all those in a Blendtech blender, put on your earmuffs, skip puree and go straight to liquefy. The resulting mush would be Quarriors! Like Dominion there is a buy mechanism that allows you to add dice from a central area (the Wilds) into your dice pool. Like Magic you spend “Quiddity” (mana) to buy\summon\cast these various creatures, spells, or basics.
Inside the box, or nice tin rather, are a big plastic space holder, four dice bags, a stack of cards, a score card, four wooden tokens, and a bunch of crazy looking dice. Have no fear! It’s not as overwhelming as it looks. Basically there are dice for each creature type in the deck. From the deck you draw the three basics, three random spells, and seven creatures. The thing is that there are three strengths of every spell and creature. So there is a decent amount of replay among the small number of creatures and spells provided in the basic game.
The quality of the dice is good, the cards are standard Dominion quality, the Tin is nice and if you toss the place keeper you can fit more dice and cards from the other expansions should you choose to condense. The only area of quality that bothered me were the dice bags and rules. The dice bags are cheapy felt\plastic things. Now I’m sure they’ll work for most people just fine, however I’ve been spoiled (as are a couple from my gaming group) by the amazing dice bags made by the fair ruler of the Dice Bag Kingdom – Dragon Chowdia Chompy Chomps. So my first recommendation is to go over to Dragon Chow and have Lyndsey make you some flat-bottomed regular dice bags. This game is crying for it!
As for the rules, they’re no Arkham Horror (the standard by which all poorly organized and moderately written rules should be judged by) okay? So don’t get stressed out. The booklet does leave a little to be desired in organization and clarity. The biggest problem for clarity comes from WizKids playful use of the letter Q for everything. The nonsense words abound…be warned. As a rule of thumb I think all manuals (even tiny minimally paged ones) should have full game play examples in them. So those are the only two points that are a bit weak for me. But for under $50 you can’t beat this game!
The turn round is very simple and everything flows quickly. First you score any creatures you have that are still alive in your ready pool. Then they go in the used pool. Then you shake up you dice bag and draw six dice…no cheating, no looking…six is the number sir. No more and no less.
These dice get a good shaking and roll then go in to your active pool. From those dice you follow any special abilities that might allow for more dice to be added or re-rolled. Then you use your Quiddity (Can we just call it mana? Yes, yes we can…) to summon any creatures or cast spells. Those creatures and spells most likely go into the ready pool. Then you attack like the honey badger. All attacks are cumulative of all modifiers and creature strength. Also each player takes the full attack strength and has to defend it. Excess damage left after killing a creature gets rolled over to the next one. If no more creatures, you start over with the next player until all attacks are done.
Finally you get to use whatever remaining mana, I mean Quiddity, to buy a new dice from the Wilds if you so choose. Then you’re turn is over and play passes to the next player. Now it’s your turn to weather the storm and hope your creatures live so you can score points and gain GLOOORY! Sorry I get excited sometimes…anyway, you win the game by being the first player to reach the target number for 2, 3, and 4 player games respectively.
I’m a fan of Fantasy Flight Games. Those guys are making gold with almost everything they touch. The only draw back is that most of their games are looooooooooooooong and conceivably overly complex. There are a gajillion bits and they take hours to play typically. Don’t get me wrong, those games fill a space in my arsenal of entertainment, and probably get the most table time of all our board games, but Quarriors! has filled a much needed gap for me. Quarriors! is great because it is super fast to set up and play and is available for two players. This is important because my wife and I sometimes just want to play something quick and easy. Quarriors! also is good for the “We don’t have much time but lets play another game really quick” moments that happen often with us. So we can get another game or two in better filling our night. So if you haven’t given this slightly random strategy game a chance yet, I highly recommend it. Besides, what gamer worth his human caltrop doesn’t like rolling dice?
