The Quacks of Quedlinburg: Mega-Box

The Alchemists is the second major expansion for Wolfgang Warsch's The Quacks of Quedlinburg. The 2018 smash hit from Schmidt Spiele is a mainstay within the modern board gaming world. Quacks of Quedlinburg blends the mechanisms of bag-building and pushing your luck. And the results are every bit as wacky as the potions you create! In this expansion, the game introduces a new extension to your cauldron, in the form of a laboratory. During set-up, you reveal three random illnesses or afflictions that have struck down the citizens of Quedlinburg. You decide at the start of the game which illness you want to try and cure. This could be vampirism, or the more-bizarre case of carrot-nose! (That's right, the citizens have grown carrots for noses...) Depending on your chosen disease, you place the associated card on your lab board. The game plays the same, with you drawing ingredient chits out of your bag. You add them to your cauldron as per usual. Only this time, a new phase gets added. After everyone's stopped drawing or blown up, check your cauldron's ingredient types. You get one lab point per unique ingredient drawn. You also get one lab point if you drew exactly a sum of seven unwanted white ingredients. You also get points for each of your neighbours whose concoction exploded. The lab points you get determines an extra reward, depending on the disease type you're aiming to cure. This could be the chance to earn more money to buy an extra chit. It could be extra rat tails, or straight-up extra points. These tantalising benefits further heighten players to push their luck to the limit! Please note that The Alchemists is an expansion; you'll need a base copy of The Quacks of Quedlinburg to play. You can also combine The Alchemists with the first Quack's expansion, The Herb Witches. Player Count: 2-5 Players Time: 45 minutes Age: 10+

The Herb Witches is the first big expansion for the phenomenon hit, The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Wolfgang Warsch exploded onto the scene with 'Quacks': blending bag-building and push-your-luck. And, on the topic of exploding, the aim is to build an amazing potion using your bag's ingredients, before it blows up... So what do The Herb Witches bring to the table? There's four key items that offer ways to mix the game up. For starters there's the witches, themselves. These are a set of new characters, all whom have a coin cost (bronze, silver and gold). Players can visit the corresponding witch and pay the cost to trigger that ability, once per game. Some allow you to shop for double the value of your potion's worth. Others grant points according to how many unique colour ingredients you pulled this round. There's a new ingredient available to buy - Locoweed. The ability it provides is that it mimics the action of the previously pulled ingredient. It can an unpredictable catalyst! (Both good, and bad...) Also in the box are new ingredient books for all the original ingredient types. There was already a lot of possibilities for variety in the base game. Now The Herb Witches allows for yet more modular options. You can tweak things from game-to-game to ensure it feels different every time! Last of all, there are a complete set of black player pieces, meaning that a fifth player can join in the fun. Seeing as much of the gameplay of The Quacks of Quedlinburg occurs in a simultaneous fashion, there's no worry about scaling for player count. The game works in equal brilliant fashion, making this another win for Schmidt Spiele. It goes without saying though, that The Herb Witches is of course an expansion. You'll need a copy of the base game - The Quacks of Quedlinburg - to play this. Player Count: 1-5 players Time: 45 minutes Age: 10+