Schmidt | The Quacks of Quedlinburg: Mega-Box | Board Game | Ages 10+ | 2-5 Players | 45 Minutes Playing Time

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.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a game I'd describe as a mid level game in terms of difficulty.There's some elements of strategy as to which chips you buy, but otherwise it's all luck (and that's not a bad thing trust me)!The game is played over 9 rounds and players are taking turns to draw chips from a bag randomly, then place them on their pot. Each chip boosts the position by the value of the chip drawn and continuing to draw chips until every player has either busted or stopped. Then you follow the scoreboard, award rubies, score chips, roll for bonus etc and buy chips, then start again from the beginning. Each time you do this ofcourse, you'll be going back in with newly acquired chips and a better bag to draw from, with the last rounds pushing you far towards the end.The game has a set of chip colours, Red valued 1, 2, 4, Orange valued 1, Green valued 1, 2, 4, Blue valued 1, 2, 4, Black valued 1, Pink valued 1, Yellow valued 1, 2, 4.Each chip has it's own effect and the best part is, there are multiple options to select from so the scoring of the chips changes each game (or you can set it to the ones you like).It's really easy to set-up, just give each person a pot board, put a droplet in the middle, rat stone at the bottom and then a bag with their flask, 4 x 1 white value chips, 2 x 2 white value chips, 1 x 3 value white chip, 1 x 1 value green chip and 1 orange chip. To make things easier for play, I will usually pre-pack the bags ready for next game with all of this inside, just speeds up the time.The game takes around 5-10 minutes at most to learn and usually a trial round helps. In my 3rd game, I played with 2 new players who had never played and one of them won first time so despite knowing the game well, I still didn't have an advantage.The game also has a catchup mechanic which gives the player(s) who are behind a catchup to help close the gap.Would I recommend this game? definitelyIs it replayable? Many many times overIs it fun? InsanelyIs luck a bag thing? No, the luck is the part of this game that makes it so good. You don't HAVE to risk it all, but there's something that just makes you WANT to.Losing this game does not feel bad at allI recommend getting an organiser crafts type box for this game and ditching the normnal insert, will save tonnes of time. The game takes too long to setup in terms of empying bags and separating chips, but that's probalby me because I like to have each colour separated and then each value chip also!

My husband and I just played our first round with our 7 year old son and we really enjoyed and liked the game. It was easy to play. It took us about 1 hour to finish. I think now that we know how to play maybe it won’t take as long next time.

Lovely game beautifully presented components. A great game for children to learn to play.Just picked up Quacks as it’s commonly known been on the hit list to buy for some time. As usual I didn’t bother with the instructions just watched a couple of YouTube videos instead.It’s pretty straightforward to play. You have a bag of ingredients and initially this manly consists of one called cherry bombs. These have a number on them if the cherry bomb number goes over 7 your pot explodes. All other ingredients move you round the pot number chart but don’t blow you up. The further you get round the more points and money you get.I did wonder if this game was actually based on the Harry Potter movies / books but they have changed the theme as the licence cost would be horrific. It would be so easy to re theme as Harry Potter -Snapes potion class.My 2 kids really enjoyed the game there’s a good level of randomness which plays into the hands of kids but there is a level of strategy. Especially in ensuring you don’t explode and choosing the best ingredients to advance you and get more rewards.There is a real Element of should you carry on and risk exploding or stop and maybe lose out. That’s good as it adds tensionThere’s also a nice catch-up mechanic called the rat tails that allows those behind to get an advantage over the start player.My girls are 11 & 16 and they picked it up easy the box says 10 + but board game geek that looks at real people days 8+ so I would use the 8+ as a guide.

Great game