Flashback Friday - Quarriors! - Love It or Hate It? Do You Still Play It?

I pretty ambivalent about it, despite buying the entire collection last year at a local sale. Kids never took hold to it. It's a game I should like, in theory at least.

Quarriors was a real disappointment, perhaps the beginning of the end of my desire to buy into hype. I loved the idea of a game like Dominion, but with cool dice and actual interaction. But in reality, it was just rolling and hoping with very little interesting going on.

This one didn't last more than a few months after that first GenCon for us.

I hated this thing. It was a crappier deckbuilder with what at the time was a unique gimmick (dice), but the gimmick only served to make the game a dull exercise in rushing a very small set of good dice that were fairly consistent. I'm told expansions helped but I don't throw good money after bad.

When I first heard about it, I thought it would be my dream game.

Then I played it. Once.

Thankfully it was not me who spent money on that snooze.

It’s merely ok at best. Once Dice Masters came out, it became clear that this was just a warmup.

My first really negative review was on Quarriors. It wasn't a great review, but it did manage to crack the top reviews on BGG that year. I think it was mostly because of the title, " Kinda Quappy ".

Quarriors caused one of the few fights I've had on Ludology. We had Mike Elliott (designer) on as a guest just after Quarriors came out.

At Origins 2011 it was getting huge buzz, and I made sure to try it out - and I was incredibly underwhelmed. Felt like I was saying the emperor had no clothes.

My big issue was that it had double-randomness. To get a combo working, you had to pull the right set of dice out of your bag (like in Dominion), and then had to roll the right sides on the dice (decidedly not like Dominion).

So trying to get combos and dice synergies into your bag is basically pointless - the combos are so rare to trigger that your best strategy is to just buy the best individual die you can each turn, and not worry about what else you have.

When Mike was on I brought this up as a design concern - and he flatly refused to acknowledge it. He said that it was absolutely the same as putting combos together in Dominion. And I could not convince him otherwise. It got a little uncomfortable until I just moved on.

Here's a link if you're interested: ludology.libsyn.com/episode-13-cc-gs-db-gs

Josh Look wrote: It’s merely ok at best. Once Dice Masters came out, it became clear that this was just a warmup.

Dice Masters has a huge following at my local game store. I haven't seen Quarriors played in years. I gave away my copy long ago.

That's what I was getting at earlier! Some of the high cost dice, dragons if I recall, were always good. A lot of the others were coin flips or worse. You could buy dice that would never do anything of value. So frustrating.

I like the game a lot as an incredibly light exercise with tons of randomness. Once you play with the "corrected" two rules it's just a tad more brain power than playing Yahtzee. I like Yahtzee.

Geoff is right that the primary issue is the difficulty in getting logical combo buys to proc and pay off Having the two buys and forcing you to decide whether to score or keep the doe does leave just enough decision-making for me to enjoy.

I never played Quarriors, but I did try Marvel Dice Masters once. It was awful. The structure of the game stripped away nearly all of the theme and setting, leaving a lifeless exercise in attempted efficiency with an artificial economy based on dice. I'm a lifelong fan of Marvel Comics, but found nothing of Marvel in the game except for some familiar color combinations and symbols. The decisions were shallow and obvious. The game play was procedural and lacked any aspect of fun aside from the mechanical action of rolling dice. We quit mid-game because neither of us enjoyed the game at all. It was clearly a greedy cash grab by the designers of Quarriors, and they couldn't be bothered to design a game that lived up to their business plan.

I remember someone on these boards obsessing about Quarriors back in the day (Matt Loter, maybe?) and having marked it as a 'Want In Trade' on ToS, then promptly forgetting about the game for seven years.

Puzzle Strike, my deck-builder du jour, was in between editions at the time. I had already paid for the laser-engraved wood chip special edition that we later found out would be completely incompatible with expansions and future revisions of the game, and despite that, I had already ordered the new cardboard edition as well. I wasn't ready to gamble on a new deck-building game like Quarriors where people thought the base set was cool but that it really needed some expansions.

Seven years later, my SO and I love Puzzle Strike... and Quarriors is still a dumb name.

I really like Quarriors when it first came out, and was extremely hopeful that expansions would add depth to the game.

They didn’t. They made it longer, and even more random. I simply refuse to play the game now, especially when considering that any version of King of Tokyo does it better.

It was totally me that wrote a gushing review when it came out. I also did a player aid that ended up very very similar to one they printed in an expansion.

I haven’t played in years at this point, but I did really enjoy it at the time and got a lot of fun out of it.

Didn't like it when it came out, haven't had anyone around me mention it since.

I've wanted to like Quarriors for a long time and have most of the expansions. I still think the idea is great, but the last few times its come out it's just fell flat. I tried to purge it last year, but one of my regulars told me not to get rid of it. Likely it will become a gift to him as I need to make room on the shelves for the next amphibian...

I’d be alright with never hearing or seeing anything about this again.

If you play with the advanced rules as the designers originally intended (multiple buys and you must cull a die to score it) the game has some meaningful decisions and can be a lot of fun. I've been meaning to try it again as I haven't played in years, Puzzle Strike took it's place in our group and now we're on a Marvel Legendary bender.