Portable Game of the Week: Quarrel Deluxe

27 Aug 2011 at 10:00:00 by John Robertson

Platform: iPhone and iPad
Developer: Denki
Price: £2.99 (free 'lite' version is available)

Summary: Mash-ups of recognisable game types can go horribly wrong. Thankfully, Quarrel is well-conceived and well-executed, managing to combine territory capture with a Scrabble-esque word game without diluting the appeal of either element.

Described to us as a combination of Dice Wars, Scrabble and Risk, Quarrel initially sounds like a daunting proposition. However, after a couple of matches within the confines of its vividly-coloured construct, Quarrel reveals itself to be shrewd, intuitive and highly-addictive.

This is a game of territory control in which, rather than dice rolls or other such statistical/probability based battles, the result is defined by your grasp of the English language. When one person decides to invade enemy territory, the player that forms the highest scoring word from the anagram before them will win the fight. First to capture all of a map’s squares is the winner.

The maximum length of word you can form is dependent on the number of troops you’ve got stationed in a given territory. The maximum number is eight, the minimum is two. This is where the strategy comes into play as (obviously) you’ve got more chance of winning if you attack a square occupied by two troops with an army of eight.

Given the shape of the maps it’s possible (like Risk) to hide away your less well defended territories behind a barrier or significantly sturdier ones, by moving them around before you end your turn. Therefore, the deeper strategy lies in whom to attack, when to back away and when to wait for reinforcements (handed out at the end of each turn depending on your success that round).

For what is essentially an iOS based work game, Quarrel is impressively complex once you’ve got to grips with the basics. You can play matches against up to three AI counter-parts, all of which have their own personalities when it comes to attacking strategy, bravery (i.e. will they attack a square containing more troops than their own) and also hold different depths of vocabulary.

Certain characters are so aggressive that they’ll spread their forces too thin in a bid to achieve an early victory, others will turtle in and bulk up their forces before doing anything and others are so confident in their vocabulary that they’ll do whatever they feel like. Pathetic as it sounds, I hate some of these characters and their God damned use of words that I’ve never heard of and their bloody nuance when it comes to attacking me from both sides and their annoyingly… I should probably stop there.

On a positive note, Quarrel is one of those rarest of things: a smart game that aims to make you smarter. That can’t be a bad thing.

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