Game: Quarriors

If, like me, you've never played a physical dice-building game before, then Quarriors should be the right game for you. It's not very complicated. You roll your dice, gather your resources, and attack with your monsters while your enemies defend. Sometimes you buy monsters or spells and build up a whole virtual dice bag of possibilities.Unfortunately, that last paragraph is far and away a better tutorial than the one the game provides. In Quarriors, the actual tutorial is a dizzying info dump of pop-up windows and flavor terms with nary a layman's interpretation to guide you. It will teach you to collect "quiddity" to capture monsters from the "wilds" so you can accrue "glory;" just don't expect a breakdown of what any of that means, or for any of it to be eased into your game organically. If you miss the tutorial blast at the top of your first round, you can dig through a series of static PDFs in the help section for a dictionary of terms and turn orders, but that's hardly optimal. Quarriors does not make a good first impression."Lucky for the developers, then, that the game is so addictive. Once you parse the learning curve, the core mechanics are surprisingly simple - and more importantly, incredibly fun. You can get through an entire match in a few minutes if you play with other humans in the room, or against the game's AI. Online matches take longer, being asynchronous, and unfortunately share the offline mode's drought of information. It took me a few moments to even realize online play was asynchronous.