Quacks of Quedlinburg is one of the best board games we own - and we own quite a few.
The goal is to make a potion by adding ingredient chips to your pot (placed on a spiralling track starting at the centre). The ingredients are pulled blind from your ingredient bag. Once you've drawn an ingredient, it must be placed into your pot. The more ingredients you add to your pot the more you score and the more money you have to spend on more and better ingredients. Be careful though, you can only add a certain number of white "Cherry Bomb" ingredients; add too many and your pot explodes.
The initial setup seemed complicated at first but once you've done it twice, you'll never look at the instructions again. The game is played over 9 rounds and at the end of each round, the player markers are moved along the scoring track based on how far around the spiral of your pot you managed to get, and players then shop for more ingredients - again, the amount of money you have to spend depends on how far around your pot you got.
Each ingredient chip has a value of 1, 2 or 4 with the higher value ones costing more and each different colour of chip has different functions depending on which of the many recipe cards you use. "Recipe card" is a bit of a misnomer I think because it's basically just the properties of that colour chip. This is where the replayability comes in though. You can choose from several different recipe cards for each of the coloured chips when you set up the game so there are loads of different combinations.
Each round consists of each of the players pulling chips from their bag and adding them to their pot until their pot either explodes or they choose to stop. It's as simple as that. The white "Cherry Bomb" ingredients have values of 1, 2 and 3 and you start the game with mostly those chips. If the total value of the white chips in your pot exceeds seven, your pot has exploded and you cannot add any more ingredients. If your pot explodes you can either take the points OR you can take the money to buy more ingredients; you can't have both (which you can if you didn't explode).
So, the fun comes when you can see how far around their pot everyone else is and you can see that maybe they're scoring higher than you, so do you risk it and pull another chip which might make your pot explode?
It also has a great "catch up" mechanism if you start to fall behind on points. The scoring track has rats dotted about on it with their tails draped across the track. At the start of each round you count the number of rat tails between your marker and the player in the lead and you can add that many rat tails to your pot - by placing a little rat token in your pot according to that number. This means that you start the round further round your pot meaning that you should end up with more points at the end of it.
The only negative thing I can say is that, because of the number of different things each coloured chip can "do", you do have to occasionally stop and check the recipe card when you place a chip. It's quite a minor thing though because it only happens for the first couple of rounds until you get used to that recipe card.
So a great game, very easy to play - we don't have younger children and the box says ages 10 and over, but I'm sure even 7 year olds could pick it up.
One other minor drawback is that it's only four players and we needed five. We bought the "Herb Witches" expansion pack which gives you an extra pot, several more recipe cards and a bunch of Herb Witch cards that you can take advantage of by spending the associated coin, but that's a different review.
Each game lasts about 45 minutes. We haven't had any quality problems like some of the other reviews have stated. We got the Schmidt version. I think there's another which might explain the quality difference.
Can't recommend this game enough. You won't be dissapointed.
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