OUR REVIEW
Hunting prey in the wilderness
QUARRIORS!
QUARMAGEDDON
Acquire fame and advance to be the greatest Quarrior of all!
Image you are playing a deck building game: You use one kind of card to influence other cards and use yet other cards to attack your opponents. You have only one buy and try - fully in the tradition of deck building games - to keep you deck lean by disposing of cards. At the end of each turn you place all cards you used or did buy onto your discard pile, draw new cards and if necessary you shuffle your card pile well, again and again and again.
Imagine on top of this; you are a mighty magical warrior who - instead of buying - uses his mysterious power of „quiddity” to catch prey in the wilderness, uses those caught creatures to attack opponents, uses spells o push his own creatures or to call them back from the graveyard or does many other things with them to finally acquire huge fame in the guise of points with those his own creatures and that you select instead dispose.
And then, finally, imagine that the “bothersome” element of shuffling is missing. I can hear the “Ah’s” and “Oh” and a tentative “How is that supposed to work?” When I now state that Quarriors! makes do nearly without any cards at all you might be even more baffled and maybe completely lose your countenance when I let on the fact that this deck building game is played with dice and heralds a new generation of games, that is, the generation of the so called Dice Building Games.
In general, those Dice Building Games work exactly like deck building games and many game mechanisms like additional buys, additional cards or disposal are sufficiently familiar from games like Dominion, or Thunderstone, or Ascension … One of the biggest differences, if not THE biggest difference, is the lacking of the perpetual shuffling of cards, which will come as welcome news for many a player. In Quarriors! you simply place the dice in a bag, shake the bag and draw the necessary amount of dice. Voilà!
The first German edition of the game Quarriors! is available in a cubic metal tin. This tin holds 130 colorful dice, 53 power cards and four small cloth bags in the four player colors. All those dice, in groups of five, are packed into tiny, really tiny plastic backs and it is very tiresome to find and unpack the right dice for each game, as some kinds have very similar colors. And it is equally bothersome to pack them away at the end of the game! So it is very nice that the game designers have already provided an expansion for the game, which this time is packed into a “standard” box made from cardboard which - besides 6 new creatures and 2 new spells plus all 40 corresponding dice - hold a fantastic plastic tray to store all but one sets of dice. A see-through lid on this plastic tray forestalls tumbling about and falling out of dice. This is what I call well-made! By the way, the name of this expansion is Quarriors! Quarmageddon.
The rules of the game which come across as forced-funny, that is, as really not funny at all, have been changed slightly in some points in comparison to the basic game. Therefore I use the new rules in this review for the core game of Quarriors, too.
As I have previously mentioned you embody a mighty magical warrior, one of the so called Quarriors. The background story of Princess Quiana and her Mage Quaxos, who serves as her oracle and of a Dragon, who announces Quarmageddon with his appearance and including a lot more of that kind of babble that is just bad can be set aside without any qualms. It has no importance for the game whatsoever.
At the start of the game you place the three Basic Resource Cards for Assistant, Quiddity and Portal, which are used in each game of Quarriors!, and put the corresponding dice on top of them, and then you add three Spell cards and seven Creature cards. Those cards too, are equipped with the corresponding dice. Those 13 cards represent the “wilds”. Each player is then given 8 basic power dice and 4 supporter dice. Each player puts those 12 dice into his personal bag.
At the start of a turn each player scores his creatures - when present. He scores the number of fame points indicated by the corresponding power card. In the first turn this part of a turn is skipped. After scoring creatures you can make a selection by returning one die for each scored creature from the graveyard onto one of the cards on display. Then you draw exactly six dice from the bag and roll them. Those dice are placed into the so-called Active Pool! The dice can then be used in very different ways, and you can even re-roll certain dice, other dice allow you take an additional die from the bag, or maybe even two, and so on. Spells will be transferred to the Ready Area. When your roll results in creatures you can summon them by means of paying the necessary power which is stated on the die in the top left corner. The price can be 1 to 3 power units. At the same time this number also indicates the level of these creatures. Summoned creatures are also placed into the Ready Area. Should you have power points left you can use them to catch exactly one Prey = Quarry die in the Wilds. All power dice and all other dice that have been use are transferred into the Spent Pile. At the end of the turn they are transferred to the Used Pile. Now all summoned creatures attack all creatures of all opponents.
This works as follows: You add the values in the top right-hand corner of the upper dice side of all summoned creatures and with this total value you first attack the creatures of the player to your left. This player chooses a creature for defense purposes from his Ready Area, if available. The defense value in the right hand bottom corner is deducted from the attack value. When the defense value is Zero, the attacked creature dies and is placed into the Used Pile. If an attack value is left the attacked player chooses the next creature for defense. This is repeated until either the attack value has reached 0 or less or the attacked player has no creature left for defense purposes. Then the next player is attacked with the full attack power. When all players have been attacked the turn ends and all dice in the Spent Pile are placed into the Used Pile. This ends your turn and the next player draws dice from his bag after scoring creatures, should some be available for scoring.
You should always keep an eye on the power cards in the middle of the table and the dice on them; those dice describe what creatures can do, what abilities they have and how many fame points the yield in scorings and what can be found on the six sides of the dice. The same goes for the Spell Dice.
The game ends - depending on the number of players (2/2/4) with a player acquiring a certain number of fame points (20/15/12) or when four of the creature power cards are depleted of dice. This end-of-game condition seems to occur very rarely, as we did not see it happen in approximately 20 games.
Resume
Fans of games from the deck building genre might like Quarriors!, but whether Quarriors! will manage to recruit many new fans for the genre is doubtful at best. I don’t really think so! The chance element at some points in the game is rather high and leaves one or more players feeling rather frustrated.
The same feeling of frustrations is felt when one is confronted with the tiny numbers on the dice of the Core Game. At least this was changed for the dice in the expansion; those dice show all numbers to be bigger and more clearly, and printed with a different font.
The rules in some places are just embarrassing. First a rather laughable story was constructed to supply a background for the game and then the rules simply brim over with words starting with “Qu” - no mercy for the reader, because also words beginning with K and others have been transmuted to Qu, the example of “Quomponents” should suffice to show that someone tried too hard to come across funny and witty. And, furthermore, I cannot find anything to laugh about in the little quotations on the sides of the boxes.
On the positive side of the balance sheet one has to remark that the game is very quickly explained and also has a recommendable short duration of about 30 minutes. Quarriors! works best with three and four players, but can easily be played with two. Two additional expansions (Rise of the Demons and Quest of the Qladiator) are announced, but currently only available in English language editions.
Why Quarriors! is recommended for players from ages 14+ or should only be played by 14 year olds remains an unsolved riddle. The game is not highly strategic and the creatures are not that fearsome! So there’s no reason not to play the game at an earlier age.
Christian Huber
Players: 2-4
Age: 14+
Time: 30 min
Designer: Mike Elliot und Eric Lang
Art: J. Lonnee
Price: ca. 40 Euro
Publisher: Wizkids 2011/2012
Web: www.wizkidsgames.com
Genre: Dice Game
Users: With friends
Version: de
Rules: de en it jp
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Fantasy topic
High chance factor because of dice
Quick to explain
Short duration
Lettering a bit to small in the core game
Compares to:
Deck building games, e.g. Lord of the Rings
Other editions:
Arclight, Japan, Stratelibri, Italy
My rating: 4
Christian Huber:
Quarriors! nicely transfers the mechanism of a deck building game to a dice game, which makes handling of the game much easier, but also results in a higher chance factor due to dice.
Chance (pink): 3
Tactic (turquoise): 1
Strategy (blue): 2
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 1
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 0
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0