A Rapid Review of Quartex

Submitted by Chris James on 03/20/2014 - 15:53. Category: Reviews

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by Chris James Editor-in-Chief and Award-Winning Game Designer

Quartex is an abstract tile-laying game by CSE Games in which players try to complete the shapes located on the corners of the tiles. Boring, right? Wrong! We found this game to be quite engaging.

On a turn, a player places one of his 5 tiles so that the shapes on all adjacent corners match up. If the player completes one or more shapes, he collects a token for each shape that was completed.

What really makes the game shine is the scoring mechanism. Rather than being worth one point (boring!), each token is worth the number of uncollected tokens of the same shape (exciting!). This creates some interesting choices throughout the game, and even makes it possible to drive the point value of a shape down to zero.

Quartex is a solid casual game that has quality components and several pleasant surprises — including shields to hide each player’s tiles, a nice draw bag, and double-sided tiles with the shapes on each corner arranged in a mirror image to help keep your options open.