The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Duel Second Opinion

How far you dare to go with adding ingredients is down to the strength of your medical mettle. But now, if you have been able to place enough ingredients to fill your own bottle neck without collecting too many white tokens, you get to move the active patient closer to your own stall. Once there, you can heal him and add him to your side of the patient track (triggering another bonus). The game ends when a player has healed their 6th patient, or the 7th round has been completed. Then the doc who has healed the most patients wins!

Final Thoughts

Firstly, let’s get the elephant out of the waiting room and back onto the reserve. Do we need a duel version of Quacks? For us, absolutely. Wow, game reviewing has become a lot simpler in 2025! Haha Okay, I’ll put a little more meat on this particular opinion bone.

My husband loves OG Quacks, and we mainly play games together as a couple. Or I play with our son. Sometimes we go all in as a three, but I would say the majority of the games played in our house is still in the 2 player zone. And whilst OG Quacks can be played with two, playing it at its lowest player count doesn’t let it shine at its most brilliant. Particularly if your only opponent gets an early lead or is just plain lucky.

But, in Quacks Duel, the changes to the gameplay are enough to make it work really well and add a bit of spice to the well-known and winning formula. It’s still a double dose of push your luck and bag building. So your fortune will be affected by elements out of your control. But when life hands you a lemon, make a super powerful explosive potion!

The tug of war over patients also forces competition, regardless of your play-type. Whereas you can kind of cruise along in OG Quacks, picking up points and rubies here and there, predominantly minding your own business as you carefully snake ingredients around your cauldron. Duel, however, is not so polite. If possession is 9/10ths of the law (BTW as a lawyer I most definitely cannot agree!), scrabbling over the same active patient shopping for medicaments in the market square is going to raise your risk profile and your temptation to brew up!

Now, there is a bit of in-round maths to get used to in Duel. If you manage to fill your bottleneck with 3 coloured tokens without going boom, the value of those get added to the value of the latest white chip you have collected. That figure is then the amount of spaces the patient moves around the game board closer to your market stall. If it reaches your stall, fab – you’ve healed that one, and you may even have enough movement points left to entice another patient to start walking your way. And if you have been savvy in pushing your market stall towards the centre of the market board, you may end up healing more than one patient in a single turn! Only once that’s done, can you resume collecting chips. I quite like that as it means less chance of you losing all progress in a given round. Plus you get to dive in again on your next turn. Mind you, never forget that every dip into that bag means a greater chance of fishing out a white token that will take you from best to boom to bust! Outnumber those white chips with bonus bringing coloured ingredients though by buying them up for the gold you have been collecting, and hopefully you’ll be attracting patients faster than a poster offering free dental care! You can’t take the gold with you so you might as well go on a shopping spree!

Conversely, if you do explode, you’ll have to choose between losing half your gold and moving the active patient back towards your opponent’s market6 stall the same number of spaces as the gold you would sacrifice. Giving the lagging player first dibs on the bonus coins at the start of each round is also a nice touch, as is the fact that you trigger a bonus for your opponent whenever you add a healed patient to your side of the patient track. Similarly, giving your opponent first choice of the end of round bonus (which you set) is neat. I also like the ability to move the market stalls along the paths (forwards and backwards), and these touches remind me of the rat tails and other efforts in OG Quacks to stop a runaway leader at higher player counts. Here, however, they work better for two players than they do in OG Quacks.

We are having great fun with Quacks Duel. It feels more dynamic and balanced at 2P. And even if you have a bigger gaming group, there are enough twists and tweaks to make your experience different in a good way.

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