Why You Should Play The Quacks of Quedlinburg

Gather your friends and make your way to Quedlinburg, a German town where an annual festival is underway. Immerse yourself among other quack doctors in a nine-day event, collecting unusual ingredients and brewing secret potions, in an effort to prove yourself as the best quack doctor at the festival. Be ready to cure hiccups, homesickness and the dreaded smelly feet with your unorthodox potions.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a relatively new multiplayer board game, being first released in Germany in 2018 and now taking the world by storm and being named the Best Family Game for 2020 by the Origins Awards. An average game will last around 45 minutes with pots for 2-4 players to play. The great thing I have found whilst playing this game is that it works just as well for 2 players as it does for 4, which is something I find a lot of board games can struggle with.

Each player has their own cloth bag to collect their ingredient chips into, starting out with the core set of a pumpkin chip, spider chip and several cherry bomb chips. Over the course of the nine rounds, you have nine chances to brew up something special, with all players drawing blindly from their bag simultaneously. The value on your chip determines where it is placed in your pot and sometimes you get to activate the chips power.

Powers of the chips can include receiving extra victory points, receiving rubies, and my personal favourite: returning the last played dreaded cherry bomb back into your ingredient bag. The cherry bombs are the chips that you have to keep an eye out for, as these are what will cause your potion to spoil and pot to explode!

You can push your luck as far as you can bear, but if you add too many cherry bomb chips to your pot, you will lose the round and only be able to choose one of the end-of-round prizes, which are: take victory points (which determines the winner in the end) or take the money to buy more ingredients. If your pot doesn’t explode then you get to take both of these prizes, so be careful how far you want to push yourself and your potion!

Your first few rounds of playing will be tough, but as your ingredient collection grows, your potions will get bigger and better with lots to throw into the cauldron. Throughout playing I find myself starting each new round thinking it’s a fresh start and ready to get my new potion brewing, then to spend the rest of the round shouting, laughing, sighing and sometimes being jealous of my fellow players, because the game is that unpredictable!

Also, at the beginning of each round a Fortune Teller arrives and announces a strange occurrence that will affect you and your competing quack doctors.

In order to win, you need to be the quack doctor with the most victory points at the end of the nine days. So, you will need to choose the ingredients you buy wisely and draw from your bag carefully in order to gain the most victory points and crown yourself the best quack in town.

A great element I love with this fun, undetermined, drafting game is that every game is different. The powers of the chips are interchangeable at the setup of the game, which makes for a surprising and new feel to each game. Also, I find that with a lot of board games the winner is in the lead for the majority of gameplay, however with Quacks there is no certainty and not a deep strategy to playing, meaning that everyone can feel the chance of winning is at your fingertips, so no one will easily get bored or feel doomed to lose!

At first the game may feel complex, but don’t let that startle you as you will very quickly get the hang of how to play, which I also think is a great part to this game as it can satisfy both the complex game lovers, but without leaving out all age groups (recommended ages 10+) and abilities from playing together.

So, if you fancy yourself as the next best quack doctor in Quedlinburg, whilst also proving you’re the best of your group (and hopefully having found a cure once and for all for hiccups), why not try Quacks of Quedlinburg which you can purchase from Magic Madhouse today!

Editors Note: You can now grab The Quacks of Quedlinburg: Big-Box which includes both the original The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Herb Witches expansion, all packaged up in one big box bundle! Also thrown in for good measure is the mini-expansion, Wolfgang’s Exchange Office!