Should It Stay or Should It Go - Quarriors!

One of my goals this year was to try and play a game from my collection at least 5 times during the same month to evaluate its place within my collection. During April, this game ended up being Quarriors!. Quarriors! is essentially a deckbuilder game where each player is building their deck by making purchases from a common market. The twist here is that rather than a card deck, the players are buying dice (which I guess you technically call a bag builder, but whatever). Each turn you draw a number of dice and roll them. Some of the dice faces have a number which indicates Quiddity (i.e. money) others have a creature, which you can field by paying Quiddity and still others may have other special faces that trigger different game effects.

This is only the dice from the base game and Quarmageddon

Like most of the genre, this game has a lot of expansions (and I own a good number of them - Quarmageddon, Rise of the Demons, and Quest of the Qladiator). Expansions add combos to the game since you only ever use a subset of the dice each game. Additionally, each creature die comes in different forms, thus expanding the variability of the game while leveraging the same dice. This is achieved by varying the reference card for each type of die that is used in any game setup. It is a cool little trick that you can't pull off in a strictly card based deck builder.

So, is the game any fun? Sure. It isn't perfect and if you don't like randomness, you can move along (it is a dice game after all). But other than the obvious, how is THIS game? Well, with four players, it is a little long. Turns are pretty quick, but it feels like its harder to score. Quarriors might just be best with two players. Maybe three on occasion. When you play with only two players, what we have found is that only a couple of the choices ever get played in a game. You might setup with 10 different cards in the field to purchase, but really, 3-4 are targeted and the rest largely ignored. And what that means to the game is that the choices don't feel terribly important. This isn't a long game, so maybe that doesn't really matter. Quarriors is a nice little game that is quick - but should it stay or should it go?

My son likes this and will play just about any time I suggest it. That's a plus. I like it well enough and it is short and sweet. If this was the only dice builder I owned, it'd be a no-brainer. However, I also have a bunch of DiceMasters dice - Avengers VS X-Men. That game is really similar (and better I think). I'm hoping to re-visit DiceMasters to decide if I should move on from Quarriors in favor of DiceMasters. Until then the verdict is: Quarriors! stays.