• Game: Quarriors!
• Publisher: WizKids/NECA
• Designer: Mike Elliot and Eric Lang
• Genre: Dicebuilding
• Players: 2-4
• Playtime: 20-30 minutes



• What's Hot: Brilliant product including 130 custom dice; fun, innovative format; ultra-light and well suited for non-gamers and very casual play; lots of potential for expansion



• What's Not: Thin, ephemeral design that doesn’t offer much beyond face value; conflict is strangely remote and indirect

by: Michael Barnes

Quarriors! was by most accounts the smash hit of Gen Con ’11, and the game quickly sold out at retailers online shortly after its release. It’s too early to declare it a phenomenon and it remains to be seen if it can maintain momentum through inevitable expansions, but the game has definitely made a mark. It’s an interesting little Dominion-derived “dicebuilding” design penned by Mike Elliot (Thunderstone) and Eric Lang (Chaos in the Old World). Unlike most post-Dominion deckbuilders, Quarriors! is actually an extremely simple dice-rolling game wherein players draft dice representing fantasy creatures and spells to form their dice pool. The idea is that you want to summon creatures to squash those of your opponents and then have your units survive a full round to score glory points.

Players start the game with a set of Quiddity dice (the game’s Mana-like currency) and Assistant dice (low-level, low-scoring creatures that can also generate rerolls and Quiddity). Each turn, dice are drawn from the player’s bag and rolled. Dice displaying creature faces can be summoned into play by spending any Quiddity rolled, spells can augment their strength or defense, and other conditional effects such as extra draws or Quiddity bonuses may take place. Quiddity is spent to buy new dice from a display featuring three basic die types, three spells, and seven creatures all represented on cards. Once creatures are summoned, they immediately attack all other players’ creatures, resolving combat in a simple numerical comparison. Attacking is compulsory and inclusive, meaning that no player is picked on or singled out for punishment.

Once the player’s turn comes back around, creatures still standing score their glory points and the player can cull dice from their out-of-bag pool. This is a particularly powerful ability because it lets the player shift the balance of their pool to favor their more powerful creatures and spells. That’s about it. There’s not much depth, but there’s not really supposed to be.

Quarriors! is extremely simple, to the point where it almost blurs the line between “group activity” and “game”. Decisions are limited and usually obvious—buy or summon the best creature you can afford at any given moment—and the strategic content is shallow. There is some observational strategy in watching what others are buying and staying with the power curve, but at its heart this is little more than a game where rolling cool, custom dice is the main appeal. It’s just about as casual as hobby games can get, and it can feel almost like Bunco for nerds.

But for what it is- not what it might be expected to be- Quarriors! largely succeeds. It’s fun to play with almost zero overhead, and it makes for a great game to play underneath conversation and cocktails. The game definitely feels ephemeral and sometimes thin on substance, but there’s no denying that it has a certain addictive quality that is likely to keep its fans coming back for more. This is definitely one that most folks will play a couple of times in a row per session, which is easy since games go anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes.

I like the packaging and presentation of the game quite a lot. The 130 colorful dice are obviously fun and the tin the game is packed in (modeled after the Quake Dragon die) is cool. The format is fresh, and I particularly like how variety is built into the design. Each creature die type corresponds to a couple of different cards, sort of indicating a different level of each creature. So between games, you might have the same creatures but different versions of them with different abilities. And in future expansions it would be possible to simply expand the creature types with cards, without necessitating more dice.

Frankly, I’ve sort of played Quarriors! out even though I’m interested to see how the game expands since there’s a lot of potential for a fuller, more robust game here. That being said, the best asset is its simplicity and lightness. This isn’t a hardcore strategy game at all, and those looking for something beyond a dice-rolling monster bash might very well be disappointed at the lack of “serious” decisions and strategy. But the cartoonish artwork and frivolous gameplay should be enough to indicate what the game’s casual-friendly design goals are—and I think it meets those very well.