The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Twitter was all like “Oh man, Quarrel is like Boggle and Risk put together, oh man, Quarrel is so awesome you should play Quarrel!”
So, you know, I downloaded it.

First off, let me just say that the versions of the game are stupidly misleading for no reason. The game called “Quarrel” is just a demo. “Quarrel Deluxe” is the actual game. I just played the demo, though. It was fun, but I couldn’t see myself playing it enough to be worth five bucks because of issues.

Quarrel is a very good looking game. All the characters have lots of, well, character. They hop around and throw letters at each other. You also fight opponents with little animated expressions and reactions, which is nice. The gameplay really is exactly what it sounds like: Boggle + Risk. Each troop you have is one more letter you can put into the word. You spell words instead of rolling. The person who has the highest point total word wins the fight and takes out the other side. Point ties go to whoever entered the word the fastest. Winning gets you “treasure” which you can use at the beginning of a fight to call in an extra dude. You do troop movements like Risk, and you get one guy on each controlled territory at the end of every turn.

All that is fine, but it just didn’t catch me. When you can lose because you aren’t faster than an AI opponent, that takes a lot of fun out of playing against the AI, at least personally. The game doesn’t show me a countdown clock or anything, so I really don’t know how fast the computer is. The game even has a little mini game to play while the computer players are fighting each other. Why not just skip those fights? I don’t know. It’s a weird decision.

But the real problem is lack of multiplayer. I’m not talking about in the demo, that’s fine if it doesn’t have it there. But the full version doesn’t have any multiplayer either. This game would be fun as shit against actual opponents, but not being able to have any just makes the game a moot point. You can beat an AI that’s intentionally being stupid, and you will fail against an AI that always knows the highest value word because it’s an AI. It’s not a challenge. It’s just kind of a timewaster. Against real people, speed becomes a fun element. Against real people, strategy becomes more important. Against real people, this becomes and awesome game.

But it’s not there yet. Play the demo if you want. It’s free, and you’ll get some fun out of it. But goodness, I can just not see the full version being a purchase you can make without very, very robust multiplayer options.