Review
Soothsayers, rats and rubies
DIE QUACKSALBER VON QUEDLINBURG
An Alchemist’s Can’t Stop
At first sight, the title of the game did not appeal to me. “Quacksalber“ or Quack, a term originating in the 16th century - today you would rather call him a charlatan - connotates, at least for me, something negative, and the town of Quedlinburg was also totally unknown to me - probably I did not pay enough attention in geography lessons. On the other hand, the publisher Schmidt Spiele is very familiar to me. The company is indelibly linked to “Mensch ärgere Dich nicht”, back from the times that did not see more than a thousand games published per year. But the company also scored hits with titles like “Kniffel” or “Talisman” etc., until it was taken over by the Blatz Gruppe, who kept the brand name alive and publishes games under that logo up to today.
Designer Wolfgang Warsch is the new shooting star of the board game community. To end up with three games - The Mind and Ganz schön clever in addition to Quacksalber - in the nomination lists for Spiel des Jahres und Kennerspiel des Jahres, winning both Kennerspiel des Jahres and also Spiele Hit With Friends in Austria with Quacksalber, is probably a record achievement. His very first games, “Dream Team” at Zoch and “Schattenmeister” at Piatnik did not appear on my radar. Okay, “The Mind”, in my opinion, is rather strange and not necessarily award-worthy, and I am not alone with this opinion. But the minds of the jury are unfathomable. But this should not be the topic here. Following Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister, we can again celebrate an Austrian designer winning Kennerspiel des Jahres!
A few words on the town of Quedlinburg, before I take a look at the game itself. Quedlinburg - first named in a document in 922 - is World Heritage Site for 25 years and is situated south of Magdeburg in Sachsen-Anhalt and the northern foot hills of the Harz. In the Harz you can also find „Brocken“ or „Blocksberg“, where it is believed that witches assemble there at Beltane / Walpurgisnacht. And this is the only - albeit rather tenuous - connection to the Quacks of the game. The town, that was Königspfalz from the 10th to the 12th century was probably used for purely rhyme purposes.
Aim of the game is to create a potion over nine rounds containing the maximum possible number of ingredients. The individual ingredients have varying effects. Here is a description of how the game works:
Let’s begin at the start. Every player receives a board representing a cauldron showing a spiral track for later ingredient placement and which also shows markings for victory points and bonuses in the guise of rubies. The more advanced the ingredients are on the spiral track, the higher the yield of victory points. The board also lists your starting ingredients - seven white chips of values 1 to 4 and one orange and green chip 1, which you place into your personal bag. Your board also shows a slot for a bottle tile, a bag image for your first ruby and a rat piece (I would have liked a real rat pawn for this very much! You use a drop-shaped marker to mark the starting point for your ingredients in the middle of the cauldron. This completes the individual player boards.
What else is there? More than 200 chips of values 1 to 4 wait to be put into the cauldron. There are, among others, crow skulls, mandrakes, spiders, etc., fitting the game topic and providing a bit of alchemist atmosphere. White chips have the majority with more than a hundred of them. Then there are ingredient books of several colors which state the prices of the respective ingredient colors as well as the possible bonuses in case of correct placement. Those books are very decorative and remind me of the books in “Valdora”, a game by Michael Schacht at Abacusspiele in 2009. They provide the variety, as they represent four different sets and therefore provide a lot of different ways to play. 24 fortune teller cards for nine rounds also guarantee satisfactory variation.
Finally, we arrive at the general board with the victory points track and the game rounds marker, again the double-sidedness of this board provides variation. A little flame piece marks the current round - funnily enough above the cauldron images; I had always thought that cauldrons are heated from below. But perhaps I am too niggling here. Furthermore, the board provides the scoring information for each round. That’s it for preparation and set-up.
Now to the flow of the game: First, a fortune teller card is revealed, which pertains to all players. Purple cards are resolved immediately, blue ones at the end of the round. Then, every player draws chips from their bags. It is strongly recommended to do this together and simultaneously to exclude any advantage for a player, gained by hesitating and checking other players’ draws. At the start, an orange and a black book are displayed, plus the books determined by the chosen set. Purple and yellow books are only opened during the game in rounds Two and Three. The chips you draw are placed at a distance from the starting drop equal to their value. This can result in empty slots in-between ingredient chips on the spiral track. The number of chips that you can place per round is determined by the number values of white chips that you draw. If the total value of white chips drawn exceeds 7, you cauldron “explodes”, resulting in restricted scoring for the round. When all are done with drawing, the player furthest ahead on the cauldron spiral is rewarded with a roll of a bonus die. This can result in victory points, a free chip or a ruby or an advancing of the starting drop. This advancing means that you will begin the fill the cauldron one case ahead in future rounds, which of course strengthen the desire to take a risk in drawing additional chips.
Then the scoring is done, which is exemplarily depicted on the victory points track. You score the position in front of the ingredient chip furthest along the spiral track. The position shows the number of victory points and, if so indicated, a ruby that you might garner. Another number indicates at what price you can buy chips in this round. The prices are, as already mentioned, to be found in the books. Shopping for chips is, however, limited to two chips. Surplus money is forfeit. Players whose cauldron did explode, are excluded from rolling the bonus die and must, furthermore, decide between shopping for chips or scoring victory points. Finally, all chips in the cauldron and all those acquired by shopping are placed in your bag for the next round. Then, if you want to, you can make use of rubies that you might have acquired. You can, for two rubies, advance the drop marker by one step or to turn the bottle, that I mentioned at the beginning, back over and fill it again. What does the bottle do? It allows you to throw a white chip that you drew back into the bag, albeit only if this is not the chip that would make your cauldron explode.
Now, the Hour of the Rats has come. The victory points shows rats. To avoid too fast an advance of the player in the lead, Warsch came up with this rule: The number of rat tails between the position of the leading player on the track and those of the other players are counted and you advance your own rat piece by the difference value ahead of your own drop marker. This lets you begin further ahead in filling the cauldron in the next round and therefore maybe do better.
The winner of the game is whoever is furthest ahead on the victory point track; at the end of the game two rubies and five shopping points are worth one victory point.
The back side of the victory point track shows test tubes offering various bonuses. Here you can decide to use the respective next bonus in the test tube instead of advancing your starting drop.
Wolfgang Warsch has admirably managed to tie the Can’t Stop temptation into the bag building mechanism, while at the same time, the drawing of chips introduces an unpredictable element of chance, unless you are able to memorize the value and number of the chips in your bag. But even then, despite a statistic probability, chance can interfere. The game convinces by its variability based on the sets and the fortune teller cards. The rules are perfect and leave nothing to desire. I, however, would not class it as a game for experts, which is not meant derogatory at all, as every family with gaming experience should be able to cope with it; the age notation of ten years is totally in accord with the level of difficulty. I am sure that the Quacks will acquire quite a number of followers!
Rudolf Ammer
Players: 2-4
Age: 10+
Time: 90+
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Art: Dennis Lohausen
Price: ca. 35 Euro
Publisher: Schmidt Spiele 2017
Web: www.schmidtspiele.de
Genre: Bag building, collecting
Users: With friends
Version: de
Rules: de en es nl
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Kennerspiel des Jahres 2018
Homogenous mix of bag building and can’t stop
Many variants
Attractive components
Compares to:
Bag building games in general
Other editions:
999 Games (nl), North Star Games (en), Devir (es)
My rating: 6
Rudolf Ammer:
Newcomer Wolfgang Warsch has created a remarkable game which lets us look forward to future highlight designs.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 1
Strategy (blue): 0
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 1
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 0
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0