The Quacks of Quedlinburg: A Potion-Brewing Delight

The push-your-luck bag-building game where exploding is part of the experience, not a failure of it

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a push-your-luck bag-building game for 2 to 4 players in 45 to 75 minutes. Each round you draw ingredient chips blindly from a bag and place them along a spiral cauldron track. Draw too many white cherry bombs and your potion explodes — you score less and miss some bonuses, but you still buy new ingredients for your bag.

Everyone plays simultaneously. Every round is tense regardless of experience level. The ingredient types create asymmetric strategies and the bag-building means every session your potion gets richer and more volatile.

Best at 3 to 4 players. No official solo mode. The Herb Witches is the expansion to buy. The Megabox includes everything.

Buy it if: you want a chaotic, colourful game that produces tension and laughter in equal measure at almost any experience level.

Skip it if: you want deterministic strategy or a game without significant luck — the bag draw is genuinely random and that is the point.

What Is The Quacks of Quedlinburg?

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a game I have brought to game nights with complete beginners and experienced Euro gamers and it has worked at both tables. The push-your-luck mechanic is immediately understood. The bag-building gives it strategic depth that takes a few sessions to fully appreciate. The moment someone’s potion explodes dramatically in the final round has never failed to produce a reaction.

Designed by Wolfgang Warsch and published by Schmidt Spiele (Pegasus Spiele in Germany), Quacks plays 2 to 4 players in 45 to 75 minutes. It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2018. You are a quack doctor at a market festival, brewing dubious potions by drawing ingredient chips from a bag and placing them along a spiral scoring track. The further along the track your potion reaches, the better the rewards, but too many white cherry bomb chips and the whole thing detonates.

The Herb Witches expansion (2019) adds a fifth player option, persistent witch abilities, and new ingredient types that meaningfully change the strategic landscape. It is covered in full in the expansions section.

Key Game Information

Players	2 to 4 base game (5 with Herb Witches expansion)
Play time	45 to 75 minutes
Designer	Wolfgang Warsch
Publisher	Schmidt Spiele / North Star Games (English)
Year	2018
Categories	Push Your Luck Games, Bag-Building Games, Family Games, Competitive Games
Mechanics	Push Your Luck, Bag Building, Set Collection, Variable Player Powers
Theme	Fantasy, Everyday Life and Social Themes
Complexity	Medium-light
Best for	Groups who want a tense, colourful, accessible game that produces memorable moments regardless of experience level

How to Play The Quacks of Quedlinburg

Each player has a cauldron board showing a spiral track numbered from 1 to around 50, and a bag of ingredient chips. At the start of the game, every bag contains identical starting chips, a spread of white cherry bombs and a handful of ingredient chips in various colours.

All players draw and place chips simultaneously, which is what keeps the game moving. On your turn, you reach into your bag, draw a chip blindly, and place it on the next space of your cauldron spiral. You then decide: draw again or stop?

The cherry bomb rule

White chips are cherry bombs. Each has a number on it (1, 2, or 3). If the total value of all white chips in your cauldron exceeds seven, your potion explodes. You get no bonuses at the end of the round and you must choose between scoring points or buying new ingredients, not both.

Exploding is not fatal. You still earn coins based on how far your potion reached on the spiral track. You still improve your bag. The penalty for exploding is meaningful but not devastating, which is what makes the push-your-luck decision genuinely tense rather than terrifying. You are always weighing one more draw against the probability of that one white chip that tips you over.

Ingredient chips and their effects

Non-white ingredient chips do different things depending on their colour. Orange chips advance your potion further. Purple chips score bonus points. Red chips give you extra draws. Green chips are bought in pairs and give bonuses based on how many you have. Blue chips trigger a catch-up mechanic using the rat tail token that moves trailing players forward on the scoring track.

The yellow chips (pumpkins) are the most strategically interesting: they act as a quarantine zone, separating your white chips from each other in the bag. Since cherry bombs only detonate if they land adjacent to each other on the track, pumpkins let you keep drawing more safely. Building a pumpkin-heavy bag is one of the most reliable strategies for consistent high scores.

Buying and scoring

At the end of each round, players score points based on how far their potion reached. Then they spend coins to buy new ingredient chips from the shared ingredient book, the price list is displayed on a board showing which chips are available and what they cost. Bought chips go into your bag for the next round.

The game runs nine rounds. After round nine, final scoring adds rubies (earned through special chip effects and end-of-round bonuses) converted to points, plus any bonus effects still active. The player with the most points wins.

Playing Quacks at Different Player Counts

2 players:More tactical and less chaotic. You can track your opponent’s bag composition more carefully and the simultaneous drawing loses some of its energy with only two people. The game works well but feels different, quieter and more calculated. Fine for a shorter session.

3 players:Good. The ingredient book competition starts to become meaningful and the table energy picks up. A solid count for a 60-minute session.

4 players:The sweet spot. The ingredient book has enough of each chip that buying decisions matter but are not artificially scarce. The simultaneous drawing produces the full Quacks experience, everyone tense, everyone watching their own bag, occasional groans from across the table. This is the count the game feels designed for.

5 players:Requires the Herb Witches expansion. The witch abilities and the expanded ingredient range support the fifth player well. Games run slightly longer at five. Worth it with the right group.

The simultaneous drawing mechanic is Quacks’ best feature for larger groups: there is no downtime waiting for other players because everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. This is the main reason it works better at higher counts than most other push-your-luck games.

Playing The Quacks of Quedlinburg Solo

There is no official solo mode in the base Quacks box. The game is built around the shared tension of simultaneous drawing, watching other players debate whether to draw again while your own potion sits one chip away from exploding is half of what makes the experience work. Without other players that energy does not exist.

Some players have created unofficial solo challenge variants targeting a score threshold across nine rounds, which can provide a satisfying puzzle for the bag-building mechanics. These are fan-created rather than officially supported. If solo play is important to you, the game does not come with a designed experience for that format.

Components and Production Quality

Quacks looks good on the table and feels good to handle. The cauldron boards are thick and the spiral track is clear. The ingredient chips are chunky cardboard tokens in distinct colours with clean iconography. The fabric bags are good quality and the blind-draw experience, reaching in without looking, is exactly what it needs to be.

The ingredient book, which shows available chips and their costs, is a shared reference that sits in the middle of the table and is readable from a distance. The scoring track and ruby conversion table are on the backs of the cauldron boards and are clear once you know what you are looking at.

One note on the chips: the standard cardboard chips do wear over time with heavy play, particularly in bags that see frequent shuffling. Many regular Quacks players upgrade to acrylic or wooden chip sets available from third-party suppliers. This is worth knowing if you play the game frequently, the upgrade is not essential but noticeably improves the tactile experience.

Setup takes about ten minutes for the first game and five once you know the chip starting distribution. Sorting the chips back into the bag at the end of a session takes the most time at teardown.

Expansions and Other Versions

The Herb Witches (2019):The main expansion and the one that most Quacks players consider essential once they know the base game well. Herb Witches adds six witch characters, each providing a powerful once-per-game ability that triggers when you draw their associated chip from your bag. The witch abilities range from letting you exchange chips mid-draw, to converting chip values, to forcing opponents to draw an extra time. Crucially, they are asymmetric, each player draws a different witch at the start of the game, which means every player has a unique ability available to them and the table dynamic shifts based on who has which witch. The expansion also adds new green chip varieties and several new ingredient types that change bag-building strategies. It supports a fifth player for the first time, adding a complete player setup for a fifth cauldron board and bag. Herb Witches does not dramatically change the core experience but adds enough variety and player asymmetry to meaningfully extend the game’s replayability. If you have played the base game five or more times and want more, this is the right first purchase.

The Alchemists (2020):The second expansion. Adds a patient board where players can treat sick patients for bonus abilities and points, plus new ingredient types including potions that provide persistent round-by-round effects. More mechanically involved than Herb Witches and better suited to experienced Quacks groups who want another layer of decision-making. Worth trying after Herb Witches rather than instead of it.

The Megabox (2021):A combined release containing the base game, Herb Witches, and The Alchemists in a single large box with upgraded components including acrylic chip upgrades and improved storage. If you are buying Quacks for the first time and want everything in one purchase, the Megabox is the version to get. It is also the best-looking version on the table.

Expansion buying order: base game first, Herb Witches second, Alchemists after that. The Megabox is the right choice if you are buying new and want the complete experience immediately. If you already own the base game, buy Herb Witches before The Alchemists, the witch abilities change the experience more interestingly than the patient board does at the same point in your Quacks journey.

Digital Versions

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is available on Board Game Arena. The BGA implementation handles the simultaneous drawing well through a resolved-at-the-same-time mechanic that replicates the tension of the physical experience accurately. The ingredient book and chip-buying interface are clean. A good option for remote sessions.

There is also a dedicated Quacks app available on iOS, Android, and Steam. The app includes AI opponents at multiple difficulty levels, the base game, and Herb Witches as a purchasable expansion. The solo mode against AI opponents is the closest thing the game has to a solo experience and is worth using for learning bag-building strategies.

Both digital options are competent. BGA is better for playing with friends remotely. The app is better for learning ingredient interactions before your first physical session.

If You Like Quacks, Try These

Wingspan: If Quacks appeals because of the bag-building and the sense of building something richer each round, Wingspan offers a similar progression in a bird-themed engine-building game. Longer sessions and more complexity, but the same satisfying feeling of a deck or engine becoming more powerful over time. Full review at letsplaygames.uk/wingspan/.

Cubitos: A dice-based push-your-luck racing game with a similar risk-reward feel to Quacks. Players buy dice rather than chips and the push-your-luck moment comes from rolling rather than drawing. A good companion recommendation for the same audience.

Clank!: Deck-building dungeon adventure where pressing too deep into the dungeon triggers noise that damages all players. The risk-calibration tension is similar to Quacks and the deck-building shares the same satisfying growth loop. Longer and more complex than Quacks but natural next-step territory.

Cascadia: Completely different mechanics but the same accessible, cheerful feel. Tile placement and pattern building for 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes. Good recommendation for groups who liked Quacks’ feel but want something without the luck element. Full review at letsplaygames.uk/cascadia/.

Potion Explosion: A marble-dispensing potion-making game where pulling marbles from a rack and triggering chain reactions creates bonus effects. Similar theme to Quacks and similar approachability. Lighter and faster. Good recommendation for groups who liked the potion theme and the tactile element.

Final Thoughts on The Quacks of Quedlinburg

The Quacks of Quedlinburg has been in my collection since it won the Kennerspiel des Jahres and it has never been the wrong choice to bring out. It works for experienced gamers who want strategic bag-building decisions. It works for casual players who want a fun chaotic game that plays itself into memorable moments. It works for the mixed groups where those two types are sitting at the same table.

The thing that makes it work across all of those contexts is that exploding is not a failure. A popped potion still scores. Your bag still improves. You are back in the game next round with a better mix of chips than you had before. This keeps the emotional temperature even — nobody is eliminated, nobody is so far behind they stop caring, and the catch-up mechanic (the rubber rat tail on the scoring track) is just sufficient to keep trailing players invested without removing the meaning of being ahead.

The weaknesses are the format’s weaknesses. The luck in the draw is real and there will be rounds where the bag deals you nothing useful. Players who dislike randomness in their strategy games will find this frustrating. The ingredient chip iconography takes a session to fully internalise. And the game does not have a solo mode worth using in the physical box.

For everyone else: Quacks is one of the best push-your-luck games available and the Herb Witches expansion makes it better. Buy it, play it four players, and have an answer ready for when someone asks you to explain why you keep drawing when everyone can see it is going to explode.

One sentence verdict: The Quacks of Quedlinburg is the best push-your-luck game available, and the moment someone’s potion explodes dramatically in round eight never gets less satisfying.

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