Quedlinburg Blisters Game Review

Mechanics: bag building

Game difficulty: Easy

Game duration: 60 min

Number of players: 2-4

Best number of players: 3-4

One of the most successful game authors of 2018 can be called Wolfgang Warsh, because three of his games were nominated for the world's most prestigious board game awards "Spiel des Jahres" and "Kennerspiel des Jahres". It was the great game "Clever" , Latvia's beloved "The Mind" , as well as "Quedlinburgas pušloųtāi", but only "Quedlinburgas pušloųtāi" really won the award as the best strategic game of the year. What's so good about this game? About it in this description.

Subject matter

Once a year, the German town of Quedlinburg hosts a huge, nine-day long fair where charlatans and conjurers come together to compete with each other in brewing various potions. You will agree that the theme is stylish. But even more cool is the fact that each player has their own cauldron, in which potions are actually brewed with cardboard tokens, into which are thrown mandrake roots, spiders, bird skulls, fly swatters and all sorts of other nasties. Also, these potions tend to explode sometimes. I think this is a great example of making a relatively abstract mechanic very thematic.

Components

The game consists of a pile of cardboard, or 4 large cardboard pots, some cards and 215 tokens, which in my right mind cannot be sorted and organized into different bags, so I keep them in a common bag that looks like I ate a rainbow. However, the game itself has a stylish visual design. The big pots really look like chisels, the game has a very intuitive and understandable iconography design, which helps me learn it in 5-7 minutes. Also, everything is fine with the quality of the components.

Mechanics

The game takes place over 9 rounds, during which players draw from their black bags and put chips into the pot, which work like a spiral scale with increasing values. Tokens have different values ​​(1, 2, 3, 4) depending on how far the players advance on their scale. But there are also white chips in the bag, the value of which cannot exceed 7 in the cauldron, because then the cauldron will explode! #vissirslikti But the most important thing is that each of the 7 types of tokens has a different characteristic. For example, one allows you to move the chips more forward, another allows you to increase the number from which the cauldron explodes. Abilities are easy to understand and very interesting, and change the game every time, as the five types of tokens each have 4 different possible abilities that can be varied each game.

After each round, players have opportunities to purchase new chips to drop into their black bag to be used again in the next round. Importantly, players should never look at what their bag composition looks like. They can try to remember it, of course, but there can always be times when 4 fly swatters are in the bag and the players can't explain why none of them are drawn.

Along with this, there are various events at the beginning of each round that sometimes help and sometimes hinder players, there are additional upgrades that can be purchased with rubies, a neat rat tail assist mechanic for the last players, and the game's pots are double-sided for easier and more complex play.

A big plus for the game is that all the moves are parallel, which means that the players are engaged and participating in the gameplay practically the whole time. This helps the dynamics of the game a lot and helps to realistically play 9 rounds to an hour.

Multiplayer

Here it is already very high in the base game, because when changing the abilities of tokens, their synergies change and players have to make different decisions. But considering this is a title game, it already has its first expansion and I'm sure there will be at least 3 more that will make the game even more playable.

Rating

Blisters of Quedlinburg is an easy game, there is quite a bit of luck involved and you have to keep that in mind, but after 9 rounds the luck evens out and I feel like I'm making big decisions as I play the game that affects my score. All in all , Quedlinburg's Blisters is 60 minutes of ultimate fun that can be played very well with any family member and has been a big hit with my family and friends so far. Rating: 8 out of 10.

You can buy the game in Brain Games stores, as well as in the online store.

BoardGameGeek rating: 7.8

Author: Kristaps Auzāns