Base price: $25.
3 – 6 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 4
Full disclosure: A review copy of Quartz: The Dice Game was provided by Lucky Duck Games.
It’s time for another teeny review! I do kind of regret going with review / mini / micro, though micro is kind of fun. I just feel like Teeny Review would have hit better if I were going for some aggressively twee branding. Never a bad time to pivot from the almost aggressively business-like brand I’ve been cultivating lately. No social media! An Instagram that I don’t really respond to messages on! Moody vibes! A bit of twee could be good for me, but these are not twee times we live in, dear reader. I guess. Honestly, the only thing I really would love to do for this site is increase discoverability. Does anyone remember the 397th game I reviewed? Me either. But that’s a problem for another time. A time when this actually makes money. Before I dwell on that too much, let’s dive into Quartz: The Dice Game!
In Quartz: The Dice Game, players take on the roles of dwarves engaged in both mining and a bit of friendly competition as they search for precious gems in the earth itself. Except for obsidian; they hate that. Which is a real shame; it’s actually quite a lovely rock. Igneous, even, but that’s just a little bonus rock fact you got for reading What’s Eric Playing? today. Anyways. Each turn, players will roll dice up to three times to get symbols that let them mine, steal, and bank various gems in order to gain sets of high-value ones. Just be careful! The better your pot looks, the more likely other players are going to try to steal from you! There’s not a ton you can do about that beyond steal back better or bank the highest-value gems to try and insulate yourself from future crime. Either works. So will you be able to make a fortune in the mines? Or will you suffer a miner inconvenience?
Overall: 6.75 / 10
Overall, I think Quartz: The Dice Game is a cute and quick little game. It’s really going to come down to a few things, for you, I think: are you cool with a bit of take-that? Do you mind having a game where bad luck can, at times, irrevocably influence the outcome of the game? Are you passionate about dwarves as a theme, even if it occasionally impacts the readability of certain game elements? If the answers to those are, uh, yes then no then yes again, then you’re probably in the right spot. Sorry, I’m writing stream-of-consciousness here and I didn’t really stop to think if the flow of the questions led to all the answers being the same or being different. It’s just part of the experience. But let’s dig a bit deeper.
So, let’s. Quartz: The Dice Game strives for a very quick experience that you can get through in less than 30 minutes, even with six players, and I think it does a good job largely holding to that idea. I’ve played with a couple different player counts and found that the game moves at a good pace, largely because it’s dice-driven with a few actions. This can lead to some consternation for players, just because many of the actions require two matching dice to activate, so greedy players run the very-real risk of not being able to do a few things because they didn’t get the cards to work out in the way they wanted. I actually found this to be one of the more frustrating parts of the game just because there are just enough things to do on your turn that are helpful or good that you run the risk of being caught in between a few different ideas. Plus, there are diminishing returns! Doing two different actions means you usually waste two dice, rather than just one (since both usually require two dice to actually do anything). It’s a tough optimization problem, though that’s where some people have the most fun. The other thing to watch out for, here, is the take-that elements: there’s a lot of opportunity to gang up on players ranging from the Uninformed (going after the player with the most gems) to the Annoying (wasting game time counting everyone’s points so that you can better tune who you want to go after). Neither person is my favorite.
But there are plenty of fun things, too. Yes, the gems are rather generic and don’t match the image on the cart at all, but, I don’t entirely blame them for going for cheaper components when you just need gems. Plus, this is the classic gem shape, now; I can’t really imagine something else. There’s something fun about getting a free gem every turn, even if it sucks, and there’s even more fun trying to get rid of crappy gems before they dock your score. It wouldn’t be as fun if all the gems were good! The intrigue is part of it, to some degree. And that’s what makes Quartz: The Dice Game a pretty fun warm-up game for a night. You can cut loose, rob your friends, and occasionally get screwed by your own hubris and misunderstanding of probability. And isn’t that what board games are all about? If you’re thrilled by the prospect, you love chucking dice and making bad decisions, or you just really, really love pulling gems from a bag, you’ll probably enjoy Quartz: The Dice Game! I had fun with it.
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