What motivated me to buy Quarriors?
- A deckbuilding game, using dice instead of cards. A new twist of one of my favorite boardgame genres. And one that nobody has tried before!
- From the designer of Thunderstone! With its strong theme and longer playing time, Thunderstone remains my favorite deckbuilder, despite its few drawbacks.
- 130 shiny custom dice. Stored in a metal tin looking like a giant custom die! Yes, please! Even if the game is nothing special, I admit that I wanted it for the components alone. Yeah, I am sometimes that shallow. Looking across my small collection, I can say with no doubt that Quarriors has the coolest box, and probably the most interesting components of all my games. The dice do have small production flaws and some numbers on them could’ve been more legible, but they look awesome!
I resisted the temptation a few months, but ultimately I bought the game. Looking back, it seems that it was inevitable. Greedily opened the box, drooled over the dice a bit and then started playing (since I have read the manual well before I received my game).
What are the rules? During setup you must randomize some cards to determine which creatures and spells will be available for the current game, along with the basic three cards that are always used.
Every creature and spell type is represented by a particular type of dice, however different creatures and spells within one type may vary wildly. For example, one “Life” spell allows you to reuse destroyed creatures, another improves the defense of one particular creature, yet another gives defense to all your creatures for one turn, and the final variant reduces the attack of one opponent’s creature to 0. And all those four are “Life” spells that may differ from game to game but only one of them may be used in any one game. Still all spells and creatures within particular type are somewhat alike, for example the base stats of the creatures are the same and the effects of all “Life” spells boil down to protecting your creatures. 386
Sounds a bit confusing? Maybe at start, but it allows for a huge variety of creatures and spells (53 types total) with less than 20 dice types. The idea is to reuse the dice as much as possible by applying different effects to them depending on the creature/spell card that was drawn during the setup phase. From a purely design point of view I was very impressed with the idea – this allows the authors to expand the game as easy as by printing a single promo card depicting a new variant of an existing creature or spell type. Brilliant!
How does the gameplay flow? Basically you put all your dice in a cloth bag, you draw a bunch of them and roll them (the tin top is perfect for this if you wish to avoid chasing them on the floor). Many dice give you a resource called Quiddity (yes, this is a real word) that you can use to summon creatures (rolled on your other dice) and buy new dice for your collection. You can also ready spells at no cost, if you managed to roll them and use them whenever you wish at a later time.
Drawing a creature or spell die doesn’t mean directly that the creature or spell will be available this turn – usually it is present only on about half of the die faces and the other give Quiddity or various special effects – rerolling, drawing additional dice, etc.
Summoned creatures automatically attack the creatures of all other players. The victory condition is to accumulate a certain amount of Glory (read: Victory Points) that is gained when one of your creatures survives a whole round. Afterwards the creature is returned to your collection and you have the option to “cull” – remove one of your dice that you don’t need (usually a starting die). You may cull as many dice as the number of your creatures that scored this turn and you almost always want to do so in order to thin up your collection and improve your chances of drawing the more powerful dice.
How were my first few games with 2 and 4 players? To tell you the truth, they were kinda “meh”… The game was somewhat fun, but at the same time it felt very random, even for a dice game, almost as if there was no real strategy in it. We usually bought the strongest creature there is, or the second strongest if we didn’t like the strongest one. Spells usage was marginal and most games at least 2 of the 3 spell piles remained untouched. Just as we thought that we discovered a kickass combo the dice for it had the audacity to land on their resource sides or not be drawn together at all. 755