Designer: Mike Elliot and Eric Lang
Artists: J. Lonnee
Publisher: WizKids Games
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 minutes
Age range: 14+ (10+ could probably handle it)

(Image courtesy of blueknight7@BoardGameGeek)

The first released expansion to Quarriors! (beyond just promos) was Quarriors! Rise of the Demons. This is a small box expansion with a new basic die, a new spell die and a new creature die. There are also cards for all these dice, and some new cards for the creature dice in the main set. How you add all of these into the game is up to the players — you could shuffle them into the main decks, or deal them out separately first and then fill in the rest with the original cards, or do something in between.

The primary thing that this expansion adds is the notion of Corruption. The new basic die is Corrupted Quiddity (Quiddity is the currency in Quarriors) — three of the faces give you only one Quiddity, two give you nothing, and the last forces you to take yet another Corrupted Quiddity, thus over time filling your bag with more junk. You can’t buy Corrupted Quiddity, you can only have it forced on you by another player, or by using an ability via another Corrupted die. This seems like it could affect play in an interesting way, but it hasn’t come up all that often in the games I’ve played with it, and since it has such a negative effect players try to avoid if it they can.

The new spells and the new Corrupted creature cards vary wildly, with either bad effects against you (with the advantage of being cheaper) or against your opponents (with the disadvantage of being more expensive). And then there’s the new Demonic Overlord die. The costs to buy this are either 8 or 9 Quiddity depending on the card drawn, but even so the powers are so overwhelming it threatens to overbalance the game. For example, when the Mighty Demonic Overlord scores, that player gets to remove from the game 1 die from each opponent’s discard pile. And in addition, if one particular face comes up, each opponent also loses 1 victory point. And the Demonic Overlord has a strong defense on all faces, so it’s hard to knock out of the game. Once someone gets one or two of these dice, they are very hard to stop. Given these powers, the cost does not seem high enough.

Overall, Rise of the Demons is an expansion that can either shake things up too much or not much at all. We’ll probably to continue to play with it, but I don’t think it’s a necessary purchase unless you’re looking for something more chaotic in flavor, or are a completist. In my opinion, the Quarmaggedon expansion or some of the promos add more if you’re looking for your first expansion to Quarriors.

Verdict: Neutral