Some games get made because they'll be fun, while others are made to prove a point. Hanabi, for example, is much more interesting than actually fun - it's a cooperative game where you hold your cards backwards so you can only see everyone else's hands, and not your own, which was unprecedented at the time. The actual gameplay is pretty basic and abstract, and nothing to write home about, but uniqueness is a big enough selling point sometimes. Quantum, by Eric Zimmerman, seems like a perfect example of this - it's a space combat game where the spaceships are dice, and you can reroll them to activate the Infinite Improbability Drive and instantly change their form. The question is, is this all gimmick, or is it a good game too?
First, the presentation. We've got a plastic molded organization insert! It's always wonderful when a game gives you a high quality storage solution instead of expecting you to root around in a pile of baggies. This insert, and the box itself, are both a little bigger than they needed to be, but this is forgivable, as the large size lets it fit some absurdly oversized player boards that are covered in rules and tips, which are incredibly handy and make the game feel luxurious. Without those player boards, the actual game is just tiles, cards, standard six sided dice, and cubes. The dice are huge, colorful, and frosted, to the point that they look like you should eat them. (Don't.) The cubes are cubes, nothing special there. So far so perfect!
The quality of the tiles is a little subpar - the cut is rough around the edges - but that's not noticeable during play, so it doesn't matter. Likewise, the cards are the lowest quality available of standard playing card finishes - no air pocketing or linen, just shiny cardboard - but they didn't need to be anything more, since they're not held in players' hands, and instead just sit on the table. It seems like they were intentionally looking for the best places to cut corners without anyone actually minding, and I'd say they succeeded at that. Only someone as persnickety as me would probably even notice, and the rest of the presentation is great. The art, especially, is beautiful, and evokes a (highly generic) space setting in beautiful blacks, purples, and blues. The box is also very eye-catching because of this. Funforge, the production company here, knows how to do a good box, and this is no exception.
The first thing I noticed about the game after opening the box was the explanation of the setting, which is much darker than you'd have guessed. Essentially, humanity discovered quantum probability manipulation tech, then devolved into chaos as every group with access to it proceeded to direct "freak accidents" toward their opponents. Now, in the far flung future, nobody remembers why they were fighting in the first place, they've abused probability manipulation so much that they've gradually changed physical forms and may as well be different alien races, and they're caught in the endless agony of being killed and revived and reconfigured through freak chance, forever. Oof.
Each faction is actually identical, for our purposes, though, and they all have the same mission - place all their resource-harvesting quantum cubes on planets. The first player to place all of their cubes wins. You do this by getting multiple ships under your command into orbit around the planet you'd like to place on, but it's a little more complicated than you'd think - your ships have numbers on them, as they're dice, and the numbers have to add up to the number on the planet to place a cube. Also, it takes two actions to place, out of the three you're allowed, so you have to be only one action away from conquest at the beginning of your turn to have a cube constructed by the end. This makes your approach extremely predictable to your opponents, who will beat the crap out of you before you can get yourself into a position nearly that good.
Your ships' numbers aren't only to help you conquer planets with plastic cubes. They also tell you three important things. First, the number tells you their movement value - a six can move six squares. Second, it tells you their attack value - when two ships fight, they roll an extra die each, add it to their ship, and the ship with the lowest sum wins. Finally, the number tells you the exact type of ship it is - sixes are scouts, which have the scout special power, for example. This all comes together to paint a picture of each ship in vivid detail. A one is called a battlestation, with the special battlestation power of getting to attack an extra time, and since the number one is its attack and movement values, it can barely move, but hits like a truck. This makes sense for a battlestation - you can picture it slowly floating through space, vaporizing anything that looks at it funny with an oversized death star laser. Likewise, a scout is a six, so it's fast as heck but may as well be made of aluminum cans. The moment you remember that you can always spend an action to reroll one of these ships, the gears in your head start turning. What if you speed in with a five, the only ship that can move diagonally, then reroll when you reach your destination, and become an intimidating, nigh-impossible to breach battlestation? Suddenly, you've acquired serious military power on the other side of the board, all through clever reconfiguration.
The "board", as I called it, is actually made entirely of tiles, so you can build your own map, like this is a Mario Maker game. This can let you address any problems you may have with the game's balance. Think the game isn't aggressive enough? Make a map where everyone starts extremely close to each other, with lots of chokepoints, so combat is absolutely necessary to get anywhere at all. Think it's too aggressive? Do the opposite. The rulebook lists tons of good setups if you don't want to come up with one yourself, of course. Finally, as the very last mechanic of this game to explain, and the one that adds even more variety than the map making, we've got command cards. Command cards are earned every time you place a cube, and also in a couple other ways such as winning lots of combat. They give you upgrades. Some are instant, such as getting to move one of your already placed cubes to a different planet, and others are permanent changes to who you are as a faction, such as "Curious", a card that lets you use a bonus movement action every turn as long as you don't fight at all that turn. This rewards looking at the game in a certain way, and combinations of these cards provide even more specific approaches. If you snag the card that lets you redeploy previously destroyed ships anywhere in the whole galaxy, instead of just back at home, and also the card that makes it so that your opponent gets no rewards for killing you, you can be much, much more aggressive, knowing that death is nothing but a free teleport for you now. Because of things like this, no two games of Quantum are the same.
We've established that this game is a lot of things other than "a game where the ships are dice". Other mechanics share the stage pretty equally. Is that enough? Well, I've seen seen a lot of people talk about this game from entirely the wrong angle - viewing Quantum as a 4x space exploration game - and for them, it won't be. They look at the planets, and all they can see is that they're all functionally identical apart from their numbers, with no flavor text whatsoever. They see the ships, and hate that they're not big paintable plastic miniatures. They see dice and assume you're going to be chucking handfuls of them to grow an empire, but you really only roll one at a time, thoughtfully, for very specific reasons.
You see, Quantum is secretly an abstract strategy game.
The most popular abstract strategy game you've heard of is probably chess. It's just pieces moving around, planning out attacks multiple turns in advance, and trading pieces for the mathematically optimal boardstate. Quantum is the same. The space theme is really misleading, and so is the inclusion of dice, as both of these things make you think you're looking at a game like Twilight Imperium, or Eclipse. There's no rule that says an abstract strategy game can't have a thin level of theme, though - chess is about medieval warfare - nor is there a rule that it can't have a chance element included to grease the wheels. I mean, if your whole strategy is riding on rolling the exact right ship, you're probably already in a situation where you were going to lose.
As an abstract strategy game, Quantum is top rate, as long as you aren't so much of a purist that you demand a total lack of both theme and random elements. There are infinite combinations of tiles, command cards, and friends you could play this with, but it always has the same skill-based core. Like a roguelike video game, randomization allows you to focus solely on getting better at the mechanics, instead of just memorizing objectively correct sequences, and to me, that feels much more satisfying.
It's my favorite board game of all time. I'm always getting better at its simple core strategy, but I know I'll never be the best, and even if I were, maybe there's a configuration of tiles out there that I'm bad at navigating, or a combination of command cards that together obliterate my usual playstyle. It's a climb with no peak, and because of its fascinating concept and presentation, most people who see it are eager to join me, just to see what it's like. They may not stick around, since they may have wanted an actual space game, or something else entirely, but if they're like me, they'll be playing it again online the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that...
