However, just by passing chance I joined in a demo game of Quarriors, and found that it seemed to be rather fun. This is despite losing in the most miserable fashion. Although to be fair that did rather suit my state of mind at the time. Since I'd bought hardly anything else that day I thought screw it, and blew the last of my money on the game straight after the demo game finished. was somewhat fortuitous as we actually left about 5 minutes after that, since the game that I was waiting for my companion to finish running had actually not happened due to someone buggering around with the tables. As I said, not a great day.
However, they do say every cloud has a silver lining. Personally I think this is bullshit, as that would clearly make them to heavy so stay up, but I'm digressing quite severely again. I wanna talk about this goddamn game.
Which is different from a Godman game. Although that would also be awesome.
So, yeah, Quarriors. I'd heard about it before, but hadn't really looked to much into it. I knew it was a dice game, which is totally my thing, but I'd gotten the impression somewhere that it was a collectable game. I didn't really want to engage in that sort of expensiveness, particularly since no one else I knew would probably be buying any themselves, so I left it. Until I saw that big tin at Dragonmeet. It seems where'd I'd confused Is the fact that it advertises itself as a dice building game. But rather than being in the sense of buying hundreds of boosters and quietly weeping sense the building of your pool of dice is actually part of the gameplay itself. Everybody starts with the same pool of common dice, and then must try to capture from the pool of available dice. So you get everything you need to start with. Which is hundreds of brightly coloured dice covered with weird symbols. This is one of the main things I loved about Chaos Progenitus. I do have a bit of a thing for dice it has to be said. So this alone was enough to sell me on the game.
Although that may make the game sound complicated, the thing is it REALLY isn't. It's extraordinarily easy to pick up, and plays remarkably quickly. However there is also a great deal of depth and variation to the game as well. At the start of the game you deal out a number of cards into the middle representing the various spells and monsters, the dice sit on the cards until captured, and the cards detail the creatures special abilities and capture cost. There are 3 versions of each monster (normal, mighty and strong), and 4 versions of each spell (cantrip, spell, charm, and incantation). Each does different things and has a different cost. This gives you a vast amount mutability to each game, whilst keeping the cost down since you don't need a whole new set of dice for each type.
Play proceeds swiftly. You draw six random dice from your bag (you get bags) and roll them. You get Quiddity (I.E. mana) with which you can summon creatures if you roll them. Your creatures attack (possibly killing other peoples creatures) and then you can spend any remaining Quiddity on capturing an extra die from those available. If you monster is still alive at the start of your next turn you score points, and whoever gets to the appropriate amount of points first wins. When you run out of dice they go back in the bag, and there's various things you can do to remove unwanted dice from your pool, draw extra dice to roll or otherwise recycle used dice. One persons go rarely takes more than a minute or two, so it's not like anyone has the time to get bored waiting for their turn.
If you want an idea of how much fun it is to play then bare in mind that I played a demo game and lost severely, then bought the game. Then I introduced the game to my friends, lost severely and bought the promo cards of ebay. Then yesterday we played it for about 4 hours straight or something, during which I didn't win a single game and this morning I ordered the expansion. I have yet to win a game, and I still wanna play more.
There is one other major plus for the game, that I haven't mentioned yet as well. The game comes with 130 dice, sure. And they are ALL already bagged up. Every set of dice comes in a little ziplock bag to start with. If you've no idea why this is such a big deal then I can only assume you've never played a game that has more than 3 pieces. And that includes the board. Actually having everything properly sorted out to begin with makes for a refreshing change, and also means that setup times are kept to a minimum.
There aren't many criticisms one can can level at this game at all really, but that's never stopped me before. There are one or two minor niggles. I'm sure many people will have already mentioned that some of the numbers on the dice are not always as legible as they perhaps could be, but this is less of a problem to me than the obvious glaring omission of none of the dice being glow in the dark. The Ghostly Spirit dice CLEARLY should be made of glow in the dark plastic. And maybe the ink on the Witching Hag as well.
Secondly there's the lack of any playmats. Whilst these are not strictly necessary, it is nice to be clear about which dice are in what pool and the like. Most likely including these would have involved putting the price up beyond a nice round number, so I can see why they maybe didn't bother. You can download about fifty different ones from boardgamegeek anyway, so it's probably something better left to the community anyway.
The other niggle I have is with the artwork. Now, the artwork is actually pretty damn awesome, having a nice fun style to it. However there is a marked lack of it available online. On the official site there are no high res examples of the card or box art that one might download and set as wallpaper or whatever. With a bit of digging you can find the artists site, which does have a few examples of the original artwok on display. But since it's only a few it just highlights the lack of other available resources. Which is a shame because, as I say, the art is pretty cool.
Other than those couple of minor niggles, and my singular inability to win a game, what we have here is a fun game in a nice package. The whole lot comes in a nice sturdy tin, which I'm quite sure has plenty of room for expansions. The lid also makes a handy rolling tray. All in all I have to say that I'm very pleased, and looking forward to playing more.
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