Every year, the city of Quedlinburg hosts a 9-day fair. The finest quack doctors and charlatan healers from across the land gather to showcase their skills. Smelly feet, homesickness, hiccups, or love troubles—these quacks have unique remedies for everything.

During the game, aiming to brew the best potion, you’ll draw various ingredients from your bag. But the best potion requires the finest ingredients, and they don’t come cheap. Be cautious: adding too many special ingredients might cause your potion to explode!

So, what’s the plan? Hope to craft a magical elixir from scraps, or play it safe, aiming for bigger profits and better ingredients later? The choice is yours, as are the consequences. Gather your most valuable ingredients and start brewing—perhaps your potion will be deemed the best this year!

Overview of the Board Game “The Quacks of Quedlinburg”

This is a light, family-friendly strategic board game with a “push your luck” mechanic, where players build their own ingredient bags, purchase pricier components, and add them to their cauldron to brew the best possible potions. The better the potion, the more money and bonuses you earn—but overdo it with certain ingredients, and your brew will explode.

How to Play “The Quacks of Quedlinburg”?

Players receive a personal cauldron board and starting white ingredient chips, which are placed into their personal bag. At the start of each round, the top card from the fortune-teller deck is revealed, adding special rules for that round. The game lasts 9 rounds, consisting of two phases, meaning each player will brew 9 potion bottles per game.

Potion Brewing Phase

Brewing is quick, as all players do it simultaneously in their own cauldrons. First, a droplet chip is placed on the 0 mark of your cauldron board. Then, players take turns drawing chips from their bag and placing them on the board. For example, drawing a chip marked “3” means moving 3 spaces and placing the chip on the board. The next chip’s placement starts from the last chip placed, not the droplet.

Each player continues placing chips on their board until:

1. Their bag runs out of chips.
2. The sum of white chips’ values exceeds 7, causing the potion to explode.
3. You choose to stop and end this phase.

The space on the board immediately following the last ingredient determines how many victory points, gold, and sometimes rubies you’ll receive in the next phase.

Potion Evaluation Phase

Time to assess your potion-making skills. During this phase, players earn victory points, buy new ingredients, move the droplet chip using crystals, and gain bonuses from certain special ingredients in their cauldron. Note that those whose potions exploded miss out on some bonuses: they can’t roll the bonus die and must choose between selling their potion to buy new ingredients or taking victory points but earning no money.

After collecting all bonuses—conveniently outlined on the personal board—players move to the next round. A new fortune-teller card is drawn, and players begin brewing new potions with an expanded set of chips.

Starting from round 2, players can add rat tails to their cauldron to move the rat chip, increasing the potion’s capacity. The rat chip advances as many spaces (from the droplet chip) as the player lags behind the leader on the victory point track. Later rounds also introduce recipes with new colored chips and the same “explosive” white chips.

The quack with the most victory points after 9 rounds wins.

Endless Game Variations

The game is incredibly varied. By changing the ingredient book sets, you can make each game slightly different from the last.

The base game includes 9 types of ingredients with unique properties and 12 double-sided recipe cards of varying difficulty. Additionally, the player board is double-sided, with a side for experienced players featuring a bonus track (test tubes) that requires moving a second droplet chip. You’ll need to choose whether to advance the droplet in the cauldron or on the test tubes.

We recommend checking out the video rules in the “Video” section and, if desired, exploring the detailed illustrated rules in PDF format in the “Files” section.

Final Thoughts

Quick games, the thrill of drawing ingredients from the bag, and minimal conflict make “The Quacks of Quedlinburg” an ideal game for the whole family or a group of friends. It’s perfect whether you’re playing with newcomers or seasoned board game enthusiasts.

Gallu the Rooster is confident that the base game’s replayability will last for hundreds of games. If you want to dive deeper into potion-making, we suggest grabbing the bundle with both expansions at a significant discount. The expansions not only add variety but also introduce new mechanics, ingredients, recipes, and components for a fifth player.

We also recommend checking out another family-friendly potion-themed game with direct interaction—“Whirling Witchcraft”. In it, you play as witches gathered for a sabbath, brewing potions. The best witch will not only craft the finest potions but also sabotage their rivals’ cauldrons.