Matthew BaileyGame 55 of the “Now and Then Summer Marathon” is “The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Duel” played with Jack(9).
“Quacks of Quedlinburg” was one of the first games I reviewed when I started my board game journey with my children back in early 2021. It’s a game I regularly recommend, as I believe it’s one of the best examples of a push-your-luck game, an incredible gateway to more complex games, and one of the best board games ever made.
Naturally, I was thrilled to hear about a two-player version called “The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Duel.”
I shouldn’t have been…
In this version, you and your opponent are quacks trying to cure patients in the Quedlinburg markets. The aim is to lure patients away from your opponent and be the first to cure six patients to win the game.
You set up the board in the middle and place your patient meeples in the centre. However, I must mention that the patient meeples are an unappealing brown colour, resembling the elderly person crossing sign you see on UK roads. It’s not visually pleasant, and I don’t like it.
Unlike the original “Quacks of Quedlinburg,” where the ingredient books were made from nice quality cardboard, in this version, they’re made of thin card and don’t look nearly as good. You also set out your personal pot, a set of scales that you can tamper with, and a pile of gold pieces. Unfortunately, there’s another noticeable cost-cutting measure: the one-gold pieces are plastic and 3D, which is fine, but the five-gold pieces are flat cardboard tokens, which feels cheap. “The Quacks of Quedlinburg” was always a game known for its high production value, but this version doesn’t live up to that standard.
You set up your bag similarly to the original game, starting with one blue, one orange, a mix of white, and a few black tokens that give you gold.
This is where the game diverges from the original in a significant way. One of the most enjoyable aspects of “The Quacks of Quedlinburg” is that everyone takes their turns simultaneously, eliminating downtime. However, in “The Duel,” the turns are taken sequentially, and the pacing slows down considerably, making the game feel tedious.
The game begins with a coin toss, and the player who wins gets to choose a bonus, such as taking extra gold, moving your market stall further down the track to lure a patient more easily, or gaining an extra opportunity to remove a token from your bag.
You then draw tokens from your bag, trying not to draw seven white tokens. Your white tokens and other tokens move along separate tracks. Every time you pull three non-white tokens from the bag, they go into your potion as payment. The key feature of “Quacks of Quedlinburg,” where everyone plays simultaneously, is absent in this version. Instead, you take turns drawing tokens, and the restriction of only drawing three tokens at a time really slows the pace and makes the game feel a bit dull.
As you draw, you resolve effects from your tokens, such as moving a patient closer to your side of the board, removing white tokens, or whatever the effect might be. You’re always inching closer to seven white tokens, which causes your potion to explode. However, the consequences of this are not as severe as in the original game. Instead of losing the chance to score, you simply lose half your gold pieces (rounded down) to the common pool. But if you’ve spent your gold already or haven’t drawn many black tokens, there isn’t much to lose, so the risk-reward dynamic shifts, making it less tense than the original game.
The game continues with players slowly trying to edge patients to their side of the board, back and forth. There’s a new feature where you can upgrade your chips, turning a 2 into a 4, an 8, or higher, which is nice. Eventually, when you manage to move a patient all the way to your side of the board and into your market stall, you cure that patient, move your market stall back, and start again with a new patient.
After everyone has either exploded or stopped, you resolve the aftereffects of the cards and proceed to what’s called “market surveillance,” which is an odd mechanic. You place an item on the table, like a four-purple token, and then decide how much gold or which upgrades it’s worth. The other player then decides whether to accept the offer. It took us quite a while to figure out who was supposed to make the offer, and the rulebook wasn’t very clear about it. Eventually, we decided it was the person who started the turn with the coin toss, but it wasn’t easy to find this in the rulebook.
The rules are another area where this game falls short. The original had such a well-written rulebook, which is one reason I always recommend it to new players. But this one is harder to read. Even though I’ve played “Quacks of Quedlinburg” dozens of times, I struggled with some parts of the rulebook and often had questions I couldn’t find answers to.
After buying new ingredients with the gold you have left over and adding new more powerful tokens into your bag, the round ends, and you start again. The game ends when the first player cures their sixth patient or after seven rounds, whichever comes first.
The components are a mixed bag. The board is nice, but I dislike the meeples, the gold tokens feel cheap, and the ingredient chips are not as good as in the base game. It all feels like a budget release, which it is, as it’s much cheaper, but here’s the crux:
I don’t like “The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Duel.” I think it’s inferior to the original in every way. The biggest issue is that the original “Quacks of Quedlinburg” already plays very well with two players, so a dual version wasn’t necessary. The most appealing parts of the original, like the simultaneous turns and minimal downtime, are either removed or altered in ways that don’t work. I don’t enjoy the back-and-forth gameplay, and I don’t think this game needed to be made.
Having written this review, I plan to do a new proper review of the original “Quacks of Quedlinburg” tomorrow! If you haven’t played that, stay tuned. While “The Duel” feels like a poor imitation, the original game plays perfectly well with two players.
I probably should have done these reviews the other way round
This isn’t a terrible game but compared to its older brothers it’s just not needed.
