When you come to play Quin, bring a Totem. This can be any smallish item, like a toy, coin, gem, figurine, or giant teddy bear. It’s up to you what it is, it just has to be at the table to be used, and signifies one of your most powerful moves: Resurrection. So make it something cool. We’ll have the first wave of collectible Quin Totems, stackable, customizable, coming Fall 2020. You’ll learn about Resurrection as you get into the game. For now just be sure you brought a Totem.
Your 17 Pieces are made up of 9 types, each with their own speed, capture abilities, and special Powers. You decide the 10 you start with, and you choose how they set up for the opening. Clone your favorite piece before the game, for a small sacrifice, and enter with just the right moves up your sleeve.
Play both of your Shadows forward, they are your best Piece for both offense and defense in the early game, but don’t neglect a Peripheral or 2. What the Shadow brings in reach and destructive power, the Peripheral counters with flexibility and support. But you’ll quickly find that all of the Pieces have their purposes, and success is about how you use them together, responsively, on the fly.
We mentioned Light, and she’s the most important, by design. Get Light to First Sight, Center, or capture your opponent’s Light, to win the game. Light is a fierce type, able to capture anything that gets in her way, but she’s far from the fastest thing in play. She’s hard to corner. Even so, revealing her at the wrong time is not what you want to do. Instead, play Light sure and steady. Creep up direct, or via proxy with Reflectors and Memory Swaps, and then don’t be afraid to strike at the perfect moment to clear her path.
In Quin, your Pieces are hidden from your rival at all times, making deceit and subterfuge constant elements of the exchange. As you get to know your strategies, be careful that your friend doesn’t get to know them as well. Quin is a battle against predictability, ensuring that the only way to consistently win, is to steadily evolve. Knowing your opponent, in that very moment, is every bit as important as knowing what is on the table, and the rules of the game. Quin is a game of anticipation and adaptation, and rewards both the subtle and the bold, more often than not.
So about those Shadows. When we said they’re fast, we were underplaying it. They are more than twice as fast as the 2nd fastest Piece, and more than 3x as fast as Light. A Shadow can’t take another Shadow – when they meet, they swap places. A skilled Quin player will use this to their advantage, putting their rival exactly where they want them. Moving across the Center of the board, cutting through the Iris and still going, a Shadow is dangerous like nothing else.
Dash the Shadow forward, then Memory Swap to trade it with another Piece, like a Reflector or Void, and you can leverage that speed into all sorts of secondary formations. Be wary the Peripheral though, as it’s probably found it’s way to the Horizon Line as quick, and has more reach than you may think at first.
Still, by the time it gets there, just 2 moves later, the Voids have multiplied, and are crossing the Iris toward the other side of the board en masse. Maybe you react by throwing up your own wall of Voids, but it’s too late to stop them from taking the middle. You could double down on the Peripheral, or fire up a wall of Artificial Light on your Gateways, throw your Shadows at the cloud and trigger Acceleration for those Reinforcements.
Your opponent uses the Power of Time, pushing you back, and a 2nd even with a Cloned Time Piece, both of them vanishing from his back row in a flash. Still you confidently bring Light another step forward, shielded by the rest of your lineup, pushing toward the win. Then his Totem turns, and suddenly on your empty Gateway he Resurrects a Shadow you didn’t expect, zipping it forward without hesitation. You stagger Light to the left, and the Shadow follows her. Near the Center, your Peripheral sweeps across from the Horizon and captures the Shadow unexpectedly, leaving you with a clear 2-step to First Sight and the win.
This is how it might go down, anyway, in any given game of Quin. Or maybe you stepped out too early with your Reflector and got shut down before it even opened up. But what you’ll know for sure is that, whether or not it worked this time, you’ll need a different strategy on the next round, to keep your rival from getting you down. As you learn how to play, getting past the basics, you’ll want to build at least 3 different setups and general strategies, to keep any opponent, in any series, guessing. Then you can really get into the mind games, bluffing with similar moves but intending a totally different outcome. After your friend sees you Swap in a Void rush twice in a row, she’ll hesitate a touch, at the very least, when you bring Light forward the 3rd time just the same, stealing victory before she even sees you coming.
