Quacksalver (Danish)

The quacksalvers have come to town to compete in making the best brews, but if you are too generous with the ingredients, you risk everything going up in smoke. You take on the roles of quacksalvers, and in front of each player is a 'pot' into which they throw ingredients from their bag of supplies.

Quacksalver is a fun and easy strategy game for the whole family, where you 'gamble' by throwing different ingredients into your pot. Each player has a fabric bag from which they draw their ingredients, and you choose how many times you want to pull an ingredient from your bag. When an ingredient is drawn from the bag, it has an effect, such as giving points to win the game, but certain ingredients can cause the pot to explode if drawn too many times. Each player knows what they have bought and put in their own bag, but how many times are you willing to draw from the bag? How lucky do you feel?

Quacksalver is the Danish version of the award-winning board game Die Quacksalber von Quedlingburg / The Quacks of Quedlingburg.

How to play Quacksalver

Quacksalver is played over 9 rounds, and they proceed the same way.

You start with the first player drawing a fortune card and reading it. The fortunes apply to all players, not just the one reading it. The fortunes usually do something good, but not necessarily for everyone. It could be that those who are behind get an advantage, or that everyone gets something.

Then you look at the board and see how many rat tails are between the leading player and yourself. The number of rat tails between the leader and yourself is the number of spaces you may start further ahead in the pot in that round when you brew your mixture.

Now it's time to brew mixtures! Players now draw ingredients from their bags and place them on the spaces in the pot. You start on the space in front of your droplet piece e or from the space in front of your rat piece if you are behind.

The different colors of ingredients do different good things, but you have to be careful with the white ones! You may have a maximum of white pieces with a total value of 7 in your mixture – if you draw a white piece that brings the value over 7, the mixture explodes, and you cannot continue further in that round. If you explode, the ingredient pieces are allowed to remain in the pot.

All players brew their mixtures simultaneously, and when the round is over, the "evaluation phase" begins. All necessary information in the evaluation phase is shown on the point board.

The game ends after 9 rounds, and the player with the most points is the winner.

Play even more Quacksalver:

Expansions:

• Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Alchemists
• The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Herb Witches

Quacksalver includes:

• 1 game board (point and round tracker)
• 4 player boards ("pots")
• 4 cardboard bottles (double-sided with filled on one side and empty on the other)
• 4 fabric bags
• 16 small round wooden pieces (1 point piece, 1 "rat piece" and 2 "droplets" in each player color)
• 1 small flame piece in wood (round tracker)
• 4 cardboard pieces (1 in each player color) to mark +50 points when reaching a round on the point tracker
• 24 "fortune cards"
• 12 "ingredient books"
• 1 bonus die
• 219 (yes, 219!) ingredient pieces in cardboard in various colors and values
• Game rules

Do you want to protect your cards with sleeves? Then you need the following:

1x Board Game Sleeves - Standard (50 Non-Glare)