Quads (Gigamic 1996)

This is an odd one we found at a community sale a few weeks ago.  Quads looked interesting, but it started annoying us right away.  After seeing what was in the box, we could never get it to fit back in the box again.  Tonight, we tried to play it, but the rules on the back of the box were so tiny, I couldn't read them even with my reading glasses on.  Yeah, they packed about 10 languages on there and made them all unreadable.  Then, when I did get a photo using the phone and zoomed in until it WAS readable, it was full of typos and translation fails, and still managed to sound incomplete.



We tried to play the game using those fragments of rules, and yeah ... if they had used four actual colors, it would have been a no-brainer.  We could have started making moves with some confidence and sense of exploration.  But instead, they went with Black, Gray, White Ribbed Vertically and White Ribbed Horizontally, and Anne never did catch on to the ribbed pattern or direction.  So that was frustrating.  Then, the natural feel of the game was to build the largest block of your color, but that's not what the game was asking you to do.  The tiny rule scraps said that the goal was to block the other player so they can't make a move at all.  Which I easily did while Anne was still looking at those textures.

I suppose we could get the hang of it after a few more plays, but we didn't want to try it again.  It was  a semi-angry argument the whole time.  It just felt broken.  Four colors would have made it visually apparent.  I also didn't like that the tiles would always have those fixed patterns.  I guess the tile that had three sides black would be great for blocking those three sides from gray, but it felt confined to me.

Rules large enough to actually see would have helped, as there's no way to point at a rule if the print is half a millimeter high.  And the rules had tiny, ineffective, hazy illustrations.  There was no mention of whether players pulled tiles from a face-down pile, or just had all their tiles face up and could do whatever they wanted.  Just, "here's a board and some tiles, and I guess you can do stuff."  Maybe there was supposed to be a rulebook inside -- ours did not have one.

Donate pile.  Still unable to close the box. 

Here is a play-through on a different edition with wooden tiles.  And here is the BoardGameGeek page listing several editions and some discussions about the rules, which had a link to this nice, clear rule sheet from the magnetic version.

There are other games named Quads that make searching a bit awkward.


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