Quacks of Quedlinberg and Tobago

 Quacks of Quedlinberg and Tobago

Got to sneak in some games a short while ago and wanted to share them with y'all! We met at my friend Fox's house and since Roger was coordinating, he said I should bring Quacks of Quedlinberg because everyone really likes that one and Fox hadn't gotten to play it in awhile. Quacks is a game I'm always happy to play, so I packed that along with Planet Unknown and Oath. I thought it was unlikely we'd get to Oath, but I'd been talking about Planet Unknown for awhile and I was itching to play Oath as it's been far too long since I've gotten into it.

When I arrived, I beat our friend Ted who would also be joining us. So we thought a quick game of Quacks would be great while we were awaiting his arrival. We'd never played with any potion books other than the 1 bookmark ones, so we decided to switch that up a little bit. We changed all the potion books to the books with 2 bookmarks. I'd been meaning to do that for awhile, but I keep playing the game with folks who are new to it and feel as though the basic ones are great because they're fairly straightforward. I really dug the idea of getting both victory points and money, even if my pot exploded, so I bought decently into some Crow Skull chips. It's a damn good thing I didn't buy in too hard, because I didn't trigger the Crow Skull chip ability even once. Disappointing. I bought a bunch of the Mandrake chips, which were great at getting me a little extra mileage on draws. Even drew into a 3 value Cherrybomb and a 4 value Garden Spider after drawing a Mandrake! The Ghost's Breath from Set 2 are cool, but I just didn't really have enough money to buy them early and I wasn't interested in dead bag space if I couldn't get them early. It worked out for me because I ended up winning the first game.

Yep - first game. Roger and I didn't realize that Ted had never before played Quacks and he arrived as we were a little more than halfway through the game. He reviewed the rule book while we finished out the game and wanted to get down on a second game. Far be it from me to say no to more Quacks, so we set up and played again! This time, we used some Ingredient Books from Set 3 and some from Set 4. Basically, whatever looked fun and interesting. If I'm not mistaken, this was our setup:

• Crow's Skull - Set 3: If you place a blue chip on a Ruby space, you immediately receive one Ruby.
• I'm certain about this one, as I bought these chips, but they did me dirty and I never once got a Ruby from it!
• Toad Stool - Set 3: If you draw a red chip from your bag, check if the last chip you placed in your pot was white. If so, you add the value of the white chip to the value of the red chip and move the red chip that many spaces forward in the pot.
• Mandrake - Set 3: When you draw the first yellow chip from the bag, the threshold for blowing up the pot with white chips rises from 7 to 8. After drawing 3 yellow chips, the threshold for blowing up the pot rises to 9.
• This one only delayed the inevitable for me, as I still blew up my pot when I drew it. But still a cool thing to have just in case!
• Garden Spider - Set 2
• We stuck with this one just because it was a lot of fun and got us more chips.
• Ghost's Breath - Set 2
• This one was fun as is and so chose to stick with it as well as the Garden Spider.

I...might've taken one too many risks in this game and paid for it. I really wanted to draw deeper into my bag and so my pot exploded a couple of times. As per usual, I chose to take the money instead of the VP. Ultimately, I fell far enough behind that I just couldn't catch up by the end. Ted ended up taking this one and I brought up the rear. Pretty sure I missed third place by a point or two, but yeah, I might've pushed my luck just a little too far.

After wrapping on our second game of Quacks, we moved onto Tobago. Roger had played it with Fox previously and really wanted to introduce me and Ted to the game. After playing something I know and enjoy, I was excited to try something new! Tobago is a deduction game with grid movement in which players need to add clues to each treasure in order to narrow down its location on the island before unearthing it and drawing treasure cards. Pretty straightforward, so we were able to start play pretty quickly.

It was good! Basically, when a treasure is unearthed, everyone who contributed a clue card (or more than one!) gets to draw from the accumulated treasure. So one doesn't need to unearth every treasure to win so long as they participated in the finding of it and accept treasure cards wisely. Basically, for every clue, there's a treasure card included in the stack and then there's an extra. Each player gets to look at a number of treasure cards equal to the clue cards they contributed before the treasure cards are randomly drawn one at a time and in an order designated by discovery order (so to speak, anyway), players accept or decline the treasure offered. The treasure cards are all a number of coins from 2-6, but there are a couple of curse cards in the deck as well. Two, if memory serves. So you decide what treasure to take based on the information you have. For instance, if you peeked at 2 treasure cards (which also means you're eligible to keep two treasure cards) and they both had 5 coins, if you're offered a 2 coin treasure card at the beginning of the draw, it doesn't make a lot of sense to take it, right? After all, you know there are 2 cards in there worth 5 coins each. But beware: you might end up with a cursed card instead!

There are also idols that confer a variety of abilities and these are distributed on the board after each treasure is unearthed. It was my first time playing, so I didn't know what I was doing. But the goal of the game was to end with the most treasure. Okay then. That's my strategy: dig up the most treasure so I get first draw and I'm getting a piece of the action wherever it is. I think I missed out on only 2 treasures the entire game? And I definitely dug up more than anyone else. I basically played the vulture in our little Tobago party as I waited for things to narrow down before moseying over to vulture the treasure. I think I ended up with something like 44 treasure to everyone else's treasure counts in the 20s and 30s. It was a fun play and I'm glad we got to it!

But honestly: any time I'm lucky enough to take 2 out of 3 games we played in an evening, Imma call that a win. MAKE IT RAIN!!!

I stole this picture from an article entitled: "Bad Financial Habits." I feel like it works for me on so many levels...