Quacks Board Game Review - Bubbling Up Some Fun!

So you want to brew potions? Sounds easy enough, right? WRONG! In CMYK's new Quacks, a gorgeous re-vamp of the classic Quacks of Quedlinburg, it's a race against your opponents to bubble up the best concoctions in your cauldron before things get truly out of hand. Distributor Asmodee USA sent me a copy of the Premium Edition of the game to check out, so read on for my thoughts - and let's start brewing!

How Do You Play Quacks?

Quacks is what is colloquially referred to as a "bag builder." In bag builders, much like with classic deck building games like Dominion, you're slowly perfecting and building up your resources over the course of the game. In deck builders, that means buying more cards that get folded into your deck. But in a bag builder, you'll earn money to buy tokens from a supply over the course of the game and slowly add those tokens into your bag. But what does that matter? And what is this bag anyway?

Great question! The core mechanic of the game involves drawing tokens (without looking!) from your bag and placing them on your cauldron board. As you wind around the board, you'll get more and more points and resources to spend on upgrading your bag further in future rounds. But beware! If you keep drawing, you'll be pushing your luck, as you can accidentally draw too many explosive berry tokens which causes your potion to explode for the round.

One of the elements I really like about Quacks is that, unlike in many other push-your-luck games, the penalty for pushing your luck and failing (aka exploding) isn't horrible. Normally at the end of each of nine rounds, you gain dollars to spend on ingredients and victory points. If your potion explodes, you have to choose one or the other (pro-tip, ignore victory points early on, you'll need to build up your bag).

Fast Play, Light Interaction

Gameplay in Quacks feels lightning-fast, even though there are nine turns in the game. This is achieved by simultaneous action - meaning that each player "goes" at the same time. So each player will draw tokens from their bag at their own pace, deciding when to call it quits vs. continue pushing their luck.

This creates a fun (and not as chaotic as it sounds) experience that will have everyone focused on their boards until the end of turn, where points are tallied and bonuses are awarded. The downside here, of course, is that there's almost no player interaction. If you're looking for a game where you can truly mess with your opponents, Quacks (and most "builder" games, for that matter) isn't it.

An Visual Upgrade (And Thankfully Nothing More)

As you can see from the highly stylized images I'm using throughout this review (created by the CMYK team), there's a lot of glitz and gloss applied to Quacks. But other than new artwork - which swaps medieval-style imagery of the original for an almost "claymation"-like look - and a smart name shortening, there are no functional differences between Quacks and Quacks of Quedlinburg.

I say in the sub-header above that this is "thankfully" the only change made to the game - and that's because at its core Quacks of Quedlinburg was an incredible game that only suffered from a goofy name that confused people. I used to work in a board game shop, and I could see customers I knew would love this game not even give it a second glance. A game this good deserves to stand out and be as attention-grabby on the shelf as possible!

Quacks - Final Thoughts

Quacks is pure joy - it's energetic, fast-paced, and there's a lot of replayability in the form of different ingredients you can slot into the game. My game group loved getting right into the action, easily picking up on the base game and mastering more complex ingredients in our second playthrough. As I mentioned above, there's really not much player interaction - but we were all too busy worrying about our own cauldrons to care much about what our opponents were up to.

If you're a fan of "builder" games and never played Quedlinburg, you should absolutely check this out. I love the new art style, too, which feels fresh, modern, and unexpected. More games should stand behind a big, bold look like this!

The copy of Quacks used in the production of this review was provided to us by Asmodee USA.