My Fidwog warband advances on the dastardly Crusaders.
Put aside any intent to win at all costs, grab your favorite snacks and beverage, and settle in for cheers, jeers, and tears with your friends. Otherwise the game becomes as depressing as war truly is, and where is the fun in that?
- page 6 of the Clash of Rhyfles rulebook
When I’ve shown my friends my Fidwog army, there’s been a couple responses. It’s always “What are these Muppet guys?” or “Are those aardvarks?” or “Why are those anteaters holding guns? Do they shoot each other?”
The answer to each, in order, is of course, “Those are quar,” “No,” and “So they can shoot each other. Yes.”
Quar: Clash of Rhyfles is by far the miniatures wargame I have played the most since I’ve started down this dark path of measuring tape and crafting supplies. It’s also one of the goofiest.
And that’s by design. Just like the colorful little guys that are fighting in this fictional forever war, everything about the way you play Quar is just a little unexpected. There isn’t any intention of competitive balance here. It’s all about grabbing a pile of dudes, some of which might be riding bicycles, carrying hot tea, or just slammin’ a cig, and rolling dice until a decent chunk of them are dead.
Quar’s brilliant twist is its card-based activation system. On each of your turns, you’re guaranteed to get three, four, or five “activations” of your units. On each of those, you can do stuff like shoot, run, punch a guy, huck a grenade, or a pile of other war-related stuff like send the squirrel-like pykpyks out for information.
The thing is, you don’t actually know how many activations you’re going to get until you run out.
My current Fidwog warband. Note the Cook with the teapot.
That’s because, before you take your actions every turn, your opponent draws from a deck of cards containing three threes, four fours, and three fives. Only they know how many times you’ll get to use your dudes, and you have to — quite literally — ask your opponent if you’ve got another action. If you stand near a table of people playing Quar, the most common refrain is, “Do I have a fourth?” followed by, “Oh mother fucker” when it’s revealed that the deck served them one of the damnable threes, stranding their most useful unit way out in the open.
That simple question contributes to an incredible amount of Quar’s charm. Most competitive games, the active player is on the front foot, declaring their actions proactively, telling their opponent what they’re doing. Asking if you have another move left flips that script, forcing you to your opponent’s permission to continue enacting your strategy, even if it’s to their disadvantage.
It’s a small moment that happens 18 times a game (typically), but gives you these tiny tastes of collaborative storytelling, an opportunity for either player to sigh and deliver the good — or bad! — news that you received that all-important fifth activation with which to blast that pesky rhyfler to smithereens.
It’s a goofy mechanic that does occasionally lead to some frustration. It’s also adding another level of chaos to a genre based around the already anarchic system of rolling a handful of dice. Might as well embrace the chaos, right?
It has led to an incredible amount of hilarious unintended consequences in my games, from the aforementioned abandonment of an officer unit in the middle of the field, to a sniper getting stuck behind a pillar and unable to fire for an entire turn, to one of my anti-tank (but locked to melee range) Lancers running up to a vehicle and just…stopping.
That guy got immediately blown the fuck up, by the way.
Any time you take a shot, throw a grenade, or try to punch someone in Quar, you roll 3D6 with the goal of trying to get as low a roll as possible. Rolling under a unit’s skill stat is good, rolling under the skill check after modifiers is even better, rolling three ones is the best — and often ends in whoever you’re targeting getting straight up murdered.
Then there’s Skedaddling. Oh, how I love Skedaddling.
Those are my guys right there. (This was before I finished painting them, leave me alone.
When you’re targeted by an opponent, you have a choice to shoot back, or Skedaddle. While it basically just means diving behind cover for a better shot at dodging oncoming fire, it’s yet another way that Quar sells its Jim Henson-ified version of war. When you do Skedaddle, one of three things happens:
You get hit, and someone has to come rescue you.
You dodge the shot and simply have to stand up to fire back.
You slam your head against cover (this isn’t canon, but it’s funny to imagine the semi-failure in this way) in your rush to avoid being shot, and have to take an activation to reorient yourself. This is called being Gobsmacked.
With such a simple mechanic, Quar is able to tell a very small story of a clumsy warrior just trying to survive the never-ending Long War over control of the world of Alwyd. And it’s not just one clumsy warrior — it’s all of them. Any one of your warband can wonk their head on the way down, and it almost always happens at the worst possible moment, leading to a full-blown cackle from the person across the table.
Those laughs are everything.
Quar is a comedy. It’s closer to M*A*S*H than it is to Platoon. It’s about little guys just doing their best to fight for what they believe in, even if they kind of suck at it.