Quartz

Dwarves are among the bravest, determined and hard workers creatures you can find. Especially when they are searching for crystals in a new mine.

In Quartz, you belong to a group of dwarves who has just discovered a new mine on their land. Excited by the discovery, you decided to make a bet. Everyone will explore the mine for five days. At the end of each day you will sell in the city, the crystals you extracted during this day. At the end of the fifth day, the dwarf who earned the most money will become the only owner of the mine.

Following along the same lines as its predecessor, Ouro de Tolo, Quartz is fast and tense game of push-your-luck and risk management in which the players, acting as dwarven miners, try to secure the best crystals for themselves while keeping their “colleagues” at bay. Each turn a player has three choices:

Extract a crystal, i.e., pull a crystal from the bag.
Play a card that brings him advantages or causes problems for opponents.
Leave the mine for that workday and cash in sets of crystals collected that day.

Some of the main differences to the previous game are that now theres is only 5 rounds, you have more strategic actions and every card is worth victory points at the end of the game, it’s possible to save up crystals from one round to the other, whenever two unstable crystal explodes you get experience tokens that will save you later, and a set collection that can double or sum more cash each round.

What do you say? Will you accept this challenge?