Akvo

[This is a tl;dr review. While the whole review is extensive, you may read the last paragraph for the overview of my impressions.]

Quarriors! is not just a game where the developers tried to stuff as many ‘Qu-‘ words in its lingo as possible. It is also a fun, light game that makes for great filler. And as much as many gamers would hate to admit it, rolling dice is pretty darn fun.

The premise of Quarriors is simple. You are one of the eponymous Quarriors, a wizard with the ability to harness Quiddity to summon Quarry–magical creatures and mystical spells that help you do battle. The goal of the game is to obtain glory for the Empress (not Queen?) Quiana before your rivals do the same.

The base mechanic of Quarriors is deckbuilding–or more accurately, dicebuilding. Naturally, this means that, instead of building up a deck of cards, you build up a pool of dice. To do so, you draw dice from your bag, roll them, and play them.

Setting up is pretty easy, and similar to determining the bank of Dominion, for example. A set of cards denoting creatures and spells are shuffled; seven creatures and three spells are drawn. The dice that are associated with these are put in the center of the play area, along with three cards that are common to every game. These are the ‘Wilds’ and represent the Quarry available for you to capture on your turns.
Like in all deckbuilders, you also start with a set of pretty bad dice.

On your turn, any creatures that survived the previous turn are ‘scored’. This means they award you with a certain amount of Glory points and are discarded. Then you draw six dice from your bag (replacing your discard pile into the bag if you need to draw more) and roll them. You may ‘spend’ these dice to gain the effect on the top face. There are several effects you can roll:
*Quiddity, the currency of the game. You can spend this to gain that much Quiddity for later use.
*Creatures, the linchpin of the game. You must spend Quiddity to summon them; they give you points on the next turn and attack your opponent’s creatures to prevent them from doing the same.
*Spells. Depending on the exact spell that you’re using, you can either spend it to immediately gain some sort of effect, or equip it on a creature for later effect.

After spending your dice for your actions, any creatures you have immediately attack your opponents. Battle resolution is simple; you add up all the offense of your creatures to get your total attack, and your opponents defend against your attack one defender at a time. If the creature a defender chooses has more defense than the total attack value, then the attack is successfully blocked. But if that creature has less defense, it is destroyed and your opponent’s attack strength decreases by that number. It’s not easy to explain in words; it’s most similar to the trample mechanic in Magic: the Gathering.

After attacking, you may choose to use any leftover Quiddity to capture a die from the Wilds. You discarding any unused dice, then your turn is over.

The rules of Quarriors are quite easy to grasp–well, they would be if the rulebook didn’t use so much weird terminology. The dice immediately available for you to use (the analog of a hand with cards) is referred to as your ‘Active Pool’; summoned creatures and prepared spells are put in the ‘Ready Area’, and discarded dice are placed in the ‘Used Pile’. Once you remember this strange terminology, though, the rest of the rules will click in place.

On to the components. The tin where the game is stored is absolutely beautiful. It looks like one of the dice in the game; I’ve heard that different tins have different dice on them. The cards feel strong and able to withstand several games, and the art on them is gorgeous. You get Standard Eurogame Cubes for marking score and four dice bags to serve as your ‘deck’.

The dice in the game are pretty small. There are more than one hundred dice in the box, so I assume they’re kept at this size to keep them cheap. I’ve noticed a few of the face have some paint defects, although nothing that makes a die completely ambiguous. Barring that, though, the dice are nice to look at; each class of creature or spell is represented with a different die. The Quake Dragon is a brown mottled die, for example, whereas the Scavenging Goblin is a stark green.

When playing the game, my group and I have noticed that the game goes by way too fast with the suggested point scores. I know this is a filler-type game, but it’s a bit frustrating when the game goes by too quickly–after all, you don’t really know whether the decisions you made are the right ones!

Luck is also a big part of this game, which is inherent due to the dice. Naturally some dice are better than others, but again, you don’t always feel like you’re synergizing dice together like cards in Dominion.

This game is one of the few games I actively house-rule. Generally I play to twice the Glory recommended by the game. This does increase the feel of strategic depth a bit, and makes the game go on for just the right amount to be the perfect filler.

[tl;dr] Quarriors! is a fresh variation on the deck building mechanic. While I had some issues with the dice being kind of small and some minor paint issues, the game itself is fun and fast-paced. It’s certainly not as deep as Dominion, Ascension, or Thunderstone, but its simple mechanics and the sheer fun of rolling dice make it a great filler game.

[If you don’t want to read the full review, you can skip down to the tl;dr clause to get the gist of it.]

Yomi is a two-player competitive card game that is meant to simulate a fighting game, such as Street Fighter or Tekken. The goal of the game is, quite simply, to reduce your opponent’s health to 0. The name ‘Yomi’ itself is Japanese for ‘reading’, as in reading the mind of your opponent, which is a skill especially important in high-level competitive play.

The game itself is played with any two decks of 54 cards; each deck represents a character and doubles as a standard deck of playing cards. Each card has two moves, one on the top end and one on the bottom. Thus, the hand that the player draws represents the actions they can take on their turn. There are ten decks in all.

The game’s main mechanic boils down to rock-paper-scissors. On each turn, each player puts down a card; this is the action they’re going to take this turn. Simultaneously, both actions are revealed, and the winner of that round of combat is determined. Without going too deep into the mechanics, attacks beat throws, which beat blocks and dodges, which beat attacks.

“But Akvo,” you may protest, “if this game is nothing but rock-paper-scissors and you can only put down what’s in your hand, where’s the strategic depth?” Well, my dear reader, curb your suspicions and doubts for the moment.

Each character’s deck is different. Some characters excel in stringing attacks together to deal heavy damage. Others are proficient at throwing but have less defense to make up for it. One character even relies on luck to throw the opponent off guard! (That one’s the panda.) In other words, while rock-paper-scissors is a game where each option has equal merit, psychological choices aside, the attack-block/dodge-throw paradigm means that each option you choose has different strategic merit, with potential long-run repercussions.

The fact that the options you have are restricted to your hand also means that there’s another important aspect to the game–valuation, or being able to know which cards are important. Do you risk using a card to throw when it has a powerful side ability? Conversely, does your opponent’s discard pile indicate that he used most of his strong options? In my opinion, valuation is even more important to the game than reading (but to Sirlin’s credit, ‘Valuation’ would be a terrible name for a game.)

Both these concepts together make for a very fun game. But how are the actual components? The cards are nice and sufficiently glossy. They aren’t laminated like professional poker cards, but they certainly are very high-quality. The art on the cards is well-done as well, and are pretty darn nice to look at. I find that the boxes aren’t quite of the same quality–they’ve already been quite worn from keeping them in my backpack. I can’t comment on the extras the deluxe version contains.

Pricing is set to roughly $10/deck, which are sold in packs of two; the deluxe edition, which contains all 10 characters, a rulebook, and two playing mat with stones to mark life is $100. Since the game is independently published, it might be difficult to find it in a brick-and-mortar store. I’m told that the import price can also be a bit hefty.

Perhaps the most negative thing I can say about this game is that its learning curve is steep. It will take you many, many games to have the game finally ‘click’ for you; otherwise, it will seem a bit like, well, rock-paper-scissors. It might be difficult to convince a friend to play if he’s not willing to invest enough games; it’s downright frustrating if they dismiss it as ‘just rock-paper-scissors’ and refuse to play anymore.

Considering the steep disconnect between starting out and finally understanding the depth of the game, I recommend playing on the Fantasy Strike website, where you can play online for free with a weekly rotation of ‘free-to-play’ characters. This is probably the best way to try and see how it’s like; after all, $100 is a lot of money.

tl;dr clause:
All in all, I find Yomi to be an excellent competitive card game. It mixes a good blend of strategy and luck to keep it exciting, and it fits with the theme and world. The art is pretty, the cards are relatively well-built, and it really does feel like a fighting game. However, its steep learning curve might turn casual gamers off to it.