The Quacks of Quedlinburg

Wolfgang Warsch is becoming a bit of a superstar. He's released multiple games during a short time frame, including The Mind, Ganz Schon Clever and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

In this game, you become Quack doctors, brewing wondrous and definitely genuine potions to charm the masses, cure ills, and most importantly get rich. Of course, when times are hard, you may need to fill it up with rat tails, but what they don’t know…

The main mechanics at play are focused around bag building, and deciding how far to push your luck. Each round you will draw ingredients from your bag and add them to your cauldron player board, starting at the middle and spiralling outwards. Each ingredient is numbered 1-4, and that’s how many spaces the ingredient moves around the cauldron. Your bag starts with lots of white ingredients in and one green and one orange. The trick is that if the total value of the white ingredients totals more than seven, your cauldron explodes, and you bust.

The further around the cauldron you get, the more victory points and spending power you receive. You can choose to buy up to two new ingredients of different colours at the end of the round. Not only do they not explode your cauldron, but they also give you access to special powers. These powers are colour-specific but for each colour, there are four different powers, with you choosing one each game or going with the suggested set-ups.

If you explode, you cannot choose to use your money and take victory points, but must instead take only one. The powers of the ingredients give you plenty of options for avoiding explosions by mitigating the dreaded white ingredients but this is a luck-based game and sometimes you are just going to draw all your white ingredients in a row.

Quacks of Quedlinburg has tons of variety, a great catch-up mechanic and is just plain old fun. Thanks to the ingredient powers, there is plenty of variety. The Herb Witches and The Alchemists expansions add even more. With new powers, new ingredients and the titular characters themselves.

Player Count: 2-4
Time: 45 Minutes
Age: 10+