First Impressions of Quarriors

Quarriors hands you control of a menagerie of monsters by way of pretty custom dice. You start with a pool of resource dice and a couple of weak monsters, and from there you’ll purchase new monsters or spells from the central area to add to your collection, and send them out to do battle with your opponent’s monsters. Build your collection carefully and hopefully you’ll come out on top!

Thing is, there is a little too much “hopefully” for my liking. Combining random draws with dice rolling layers luck on top of luck until the pile begins to collapse into a black hole of decisionlessness… wow ok maybe I’m going too far here. Quarriors is known as a “dice-building” game, taking it’s name from deck builders like Dominion. In it you “build” a collection of dice over the course of the game that, if built well, will reward you with victory points. In Quarriors, those VPs come from summoning monsters and having them survive a full round of your opponent’s monsters attacking you. Where it went horribly wrong for me is not drawing dice from your bag randomly (that rewards balancing purchases of the different elements of the game), but the fact that when you roll them, you might get a healthy selection of monsters to send out… or you might get sod all and tough luck. And the only ways of mitigating bad dice rolls are – yep – based on those dice you roll too.

I was expecting (maybe hoping for) Dominion with dice, and while it ostensibly follows that idea, Quarriors never felt like it had the depth that Dominion offers. The combo-ing of abilities to perform frankly outrageous turns is what makes Dominion so compelling, and searching for those new, exciting combos is what brings people back to play it again and again. Quarriors is missing that. Not only do the special abilities of the dice not seem to offer such interesting options, those abilities can only activate maybe a third or one-sixth of the time, meaning all too often you’ll never get to see what a monster could do. And that makes too much of the main decision, what to buy each round, almost meaningless.

On the bright side, the focus on fighting one another makes Quarriors intrinsically interactive, successfully heading off one of Dominion’s biggest criticisms, at least on paper. What it boils down to in gameplay terms, though, is placing out as many monsters as you possibly can, and crossing your fingers that something survives the round. There are no interesting decisions to be made, shattering the illusion of interaction in any meaningful sense.

I have wanted to try Quarriors for a long time, but I was truly disappointed by it. Perhaps I just had an unfortunate first taste of it, and I will be happy to be proven wrong. It also makes me curious to see what Marvel Dice Masters, one of the other popular “dice-building” games, does differently. Let me know your thoughts and experiences of these games in the comments!