Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I love pawing around in a bag and drawing out stuff. I think Orleans is a superlative game that barely shows its age. Quacks, the zooted-up new version of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, adds a fun new charm to a solid game, mainly in the form of new artwork and more luxe components.
Potion Explosion
Quacks casts you as a quack doctor, making potions to sell to unwitting doofuses who think drinking a potion with a combination of ghost essence, spiders, and mushrooms is a good idea. You pull random stuff out of your ingredient bag and throw it into a cauldron, which makes the potion more valuable, but you have to watch out, because too much of one specific ingredient makes the whole thing explode.
Mechanically speaking, Quacks is a bag builder, which in this case means that you’re going to put tokens in a bag, and push your luck trying to draw them out in just the right way without exceeding a sum total of 7 of the white tokens, which trigger an explosion. Each token, when drawn, makes your overall potion increase in value by the number on the token. For example, you draw a token with a 3, you count 3 spaces and place the token on your potion track.
Everyone is drawing tokens simultaneously, and you stop when you feel you’ve done well enough—which I almost never do, because it’s way more fun to explode your potion.
But if you’re a pesky game-player, you want to stop so you can get dual benefits—points AND the ability to buy new chits for your bag for the next round. If your potion explodes, you only get to do one of the two. Plus, there’s bonuses for the highest scoring unexploded player.
On top of all of this, the little bits and bobs you draw have powers (sometimes). Nine rounds of increasing bag power, and prest-o change-o: you’ve got yourself a game.
Charlatan Nouveau
Other than an aesthetic shift, this version of the game remains the same as the previous. I am a fan of Denis Lohausen, so I view the shift to Ryogo Toyoda’s Aardman-style CG claymation as a lateral move, rather than an improvement. The new visuals are great, and the review copy I received had little plastic bits (which come with the deluxe and all-in versions of the game) for the potion ingredients, which is a nice shift from the cardboard of the original.
The All-In edition of the game also includes the expansions for the original game (The Herb Witches and The Alchemists) in one handy box, which is fine. I think both are decent additions, though the addition of both make the game significantly more cerebral than the base game’s relatively simple “How much hubris am I feeling today” calculation. The Herb Witches adds witches with special powers that you can spend “witch pennies” on to get special boons once per game as well as a new type of ingredient that has variable value depending on which randomizer you use for it during setup.
The Alchemists is the most complicated, and modifies the central push-your-luck conceit. Whether your potion explodes or not, you move along a new personal track that grants bonuses and powers based on the different tokens you drew. It can incentivize players to take fewer risks and also generalize which ingredients they choose to take to attempt to game their personal boards. It’s an interesting puzzle, but not essential.
Potent Potables
Quacks is the second “new edition” of an older game that I’ve reviewed in a very short period, and unlike the other game (Star Trek: Star Realms), this one seems like a good product. Writing about games as consumer objects isn’t my favorite thing to do, but in this case, Quacks is, as they say in the provinces, FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
