asy to teach.
The numbers card climbing up basically plays like Blackjack, which can be dull after a while, but the currency cards deducting from your sum offers more room to keep pressing your luck.
The inclusion of currency, and special currency for busting gives losing players a small catchup opportunity when dealingwith auctions or purchasing cards from the market. These two features gives you more areas to play in so it's not a completely linear experience.
That said, after a few playthroughs, I sort of wish there was a slight difference in point payout for having a longer chain. There were times where I could decide between where I slot a wild card, but either option netted the same number of points, so while that makes for a simpler game, it was also a bit of lackluster feature.
This game requires you to be into vocab and trivia. If you struggle with both, you will not enjoy this game.
If you're good with both, this game offers an intense activity of coming up with words in a short period of time. It challenges your vocab with the themes and requirements (such as coming up with "3 different words that all start with the same 3 letters", or "Foods that total to 12 letters or more").
Production quality is pretty good overall. The silk-screening on the letters are coming off with a few plays, but the cards, box, and sack are excellent quality.
Not an exaggeration, but the base game suffered from a couple of features that felt like an after-thought and was meant to be some catch-up score for players not participating in the game. The "Zero-Bid" avenue of scoring doesn't align with the rest of the game.
This expansion does away with that and offers an additional incentive for people to be the 2nd highest bidder. It also offers a new line for you to deduct from your total expenses, so it no longer becomes as clear who will have spent the most money at the end of the game.
It adds significantly more value to the game and it should always be included each time you play QE.
Design isn't bad. The guessing of numbers to ding people on is great. The core game is good.
The absence of a theme makes this extremely dry and boring to sit through.
This offers the Basement level to build modules on. The catch is that only basement tiles can be built here. None of the other tiles (aside from Entrance tiles) can be built here, so it's quite closed off in that regard. There's no such thing as an "underground parking", which was a massive letdown.
The Basement tiles do offer some rather fun stuff, and poses as an alternative movement accelerator to conveyors... but that's about it. I don't think this offers enough for the asking price. I would skip on this unless you've already got the first three expansions and want more.
Between 4th and 5th, I'd pick up 4th, but given how little you get to really do in the game overall, I can live without the Basement tiles.