In this peculiarly named game, each player takes on the role of an apothecary trying to prove themselves the best potion brewer in the land. But everyone is really a "quack" haphazardly tossing ingredients into their concoctions, equally likely to create an amazing potion or explode the cauldron. It's a press your luck and "pool building" game, in which each player grows a bag of ingredients over the course of nine rounds. Each round, you pull ingredients from your bag as long as you dare. Many score you points and/or build your potion to greater effectiveness. One type of ingredient counts against a running total; if you hit 8 or more before you stop, your potion "explodes" and costs you either points or the ability to purchase new ingredients for the next round.
If Quacks of Quedlinburg is any indication of years to come, at some point they're going to need to introduce a new "advanced" category above this. The game may sound like a lot at first, but everyone I've seen try it (no matter their level of interest in board games) seems to take to it very quickly. Indeed, the main 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul, is only barely harder to teach than this.
Quacks of Quedlinburg has a similar feel to Dominion, in that it uses the mechanisms of a deck builder (with the bag being your deck), while actually being quite constrained in "card" variety. In Dominion, you use a limited number of cards in any given game. In Quacks, you have a limited number of ingredients -- and each is simple enough that it can be explained on a single reference card placed in the center of the table. There are multiple options for what many of the ingredients can do, and this allows you to change things up from one play to the next. But your decisions are always tightly contained.
As with Dominion, this constraint is both a strength and a shortcoming of the game. Combos and strategies are easy to discern, and this helps make it easy to pick up. But deck builders with broader variety, such as Ascension and (dare I say) Clank! (/end plug) can force you to adopt new strategies on the fly when the avenue you'd been pursuing suddenly becomes unavailable. In a game like Dominion or Quacks of Quedlinburg, the options are all there for you. If you decide that one particular ingredient is the path to victory, you can just lean on it and buy it turn after turn. Nothing is really going to kick you off the narrow path you've defined for yourself, and nothing your opponents do is liable to have much effect on you.
Adding to this sense of playing "parallel solitaire," players pull their ingredients all simultaneously each round. It's the right choice to speed the game along -- but when each of us is focused on our own bag, not really watching anyone else, the feeling that we're not totally playing this together intensifies. There are moments of interaction -- a catch-up mechanic to help players lagging in score, one particular ingredient that makes you compare yourself to your two adjacent opponents -- but these more interactive moments are rather limited.
With the choices constrained and not often impacted by other players, the game really can feel like it just comes down to luck in the end. It can still be fun along the way -- it's hard not to feel at least some rush out of the "dare I pull one more time?" decision -- but I find it fairly lacking in real strategy for a "Connoisseur-gamer" Game of the Year. In a nutshell, I was far more taken with Azul.
I can imagine I'll play The Quacks of Quedlinburg some more. I would play if someone else suggested it. But it's not a game I'll be suggesting myself. I'd grade it a B-.
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