The Dark Quarter Preview

boardgamequest.com:

Note: This preview uses pre-release components and rules. What you see here may be different from the final, published game.

Welcome to New Orleans, circa 1980. It’s a city of music, magic, and delicious food. Award-winning publishers Lucky Duck Games and Van Ryder Games have teamed up to bring us The Dark Quarter. It’s a mature investigative game of murder, mystery, and dark magic. Designed by Evan Derrick, this cooperative game uses Lucky Duck’s app-assisted QR code technology first seen in Chronicles of Crime. We had a chance to play through the first scenario in the game and are ready to give you some spoiler free details.

To play The Dark Quarter, each player gets to control one of four unique investigators as you tackle the chosen scenario. The game is handled via rotating turns between players, and uses a hidden timer to track the player’s progress. Take too long and the game will end in a failure.

On a player’s turn, they first refresh an effort die, these are spent to aid in skill challenges. They can also purchase a skill card if they have enough experience points. The player can also scan any items in their possession using the app and a QR code if they want to look at it in more detail. These are all kind of preliminary actions though. The main thing players will do on their turn is visit a location.

The map is a bit abstract (although wonderfully illustrated by Damien Mammoliti) as points of interest are placed on it in various spots as discovered. But characters can move to any location on their turn without regard to travel time.

Interacting with a location is all handled through the app. These will be searching points of interest or talking with non-player characters (NPCs). Most of these interactions are