This Quars War

Joshua Qualtieri WILL make his Paracosm happen!

I stumbled, addled, into my local semi-rural game store in search of off-brand Contrast paint to finish up Ionus Cryptborn, and while wandering around, I saw the strangest thing; a single box, in the spot where the newly-arrived, single-type or just oddly specific boxes are set, guarding the door like a cyclops.

Unless you know about game stores, even quite well-supplied ones, you won't have a clear idea of just how singular and unlike anything else there this was.

Wargames are usually either Historical, part of some well known Paracosm like Star Wars, Marvel or 40k, generic genre entries, (i.e. Chthulu-like or Western-like), or one of a few Paracosm not well known outside wargames but reasonably so within; Malifaux, Warmachine/Hordes, etc.

I am pretty well up on my wargames and I had absolutely no idea what this was. What’s a 'Quar'? Why are they at war? Why are they using 'Rhyfles'? This looks like decade-long Fantasy Heartbreaker paracosm created by some guy in a basement where they eventually find it as they clear out his house after death and he becomes a Local Legend and gets a small Wikipedia page.

And that nearly is what this is, except Joshua Qualtieri isn't dead and has been running a small Quar-based business in America for quite some time, selling Quar he cast with the spinny bits of a washing machine he took apart a while ago, and working hard to make Quar, his childhood Anteater Ralph Bashki/Jim Henson WW1.5 dieselpunk peudo-european paracosm pals, a thing, using every medium he can get his hands on;

There was, and may still be, a Quar-based VR Real Time Strategy game…

I have no idea if this went anywhere.

And now Atlantic Wargames have produced a plastic injection moulded Quar Wars boxed set strategy game. From what I can tell, Atlantic focused largely on Historical wargames. More recently they have begun producing some pretty-good generic fantasy sets like mythic skeletons and goblin hordes, and a range of dark-future Sci-Fi sets for their skirmish game 'Death Fields'. A standard route for a wargames company in the U.K. is to semi-parasitize off Games Workshop by producing stuff that is nominally different but in-effect can be used for GW games. Its a soft route to a kind of medium success with some strong limitations.

But now cometh.. the Quar! A boxed set with an Indie vibe that might remind some of you of early OSR books.

The box has cartoon standee scenery printed into its base, so you can cut it out and play with it.

Hidden revolutionary and royalist slogans in the folds

And the initiative cards are this custom print of perhaps-grieving tender leaves

What are Quar?

Cute, slightly muppet-looking Anteater-people living on the continent of Alwyd, (which *might* be on the other side of the globe from the place where Ralph Bashkis 'Wizards' is set?).

They have a roughly 1910'/1920's level of technology, a bunch of nations and have been locked in various forms of war for a long time.

So like, Jim Henson Anteaters plus post-Westphalia Europe?

The Quar are very cute and they fight in very sad wars. They look like muppets or 70s animation but use guns with specifically worked out calibres and individual design ethos' for each different nation and group.

They have specifically sculpted Baguette bags, that is tiny 28mm knapsacks with tiny French style baguettes sticking out of them that you can glue onto your tiny Quar so they don't need to enter a rhyfle skirmish without their lunch, and they exist in an exhaustively worked-out paracosm with highly-complex and interrelated Great-Power style international and intranational relations.

Quar look like they were drawn by a child, (because they were; Joshua Qualteri, age = small), and a key plot point might be, for instance, a royalist kingdom bankrupted by war taking out huge loans from a semi-independent city state to keep its economy afloat but thereby being drawn into colonial adventures that provoke a classic "war on two fronts".

Also they write sad letters to their families about the nature of industrial warfare. The letters are in the rulebooks;

Is this an extremely crunchy war simulation or more of a Vibes game?

Yes?

The two factions in the starter box have distinct Squad formations and loadouts based on their available and preferred technology. The Royalist and traditionalist Coftryans have squads broken down into larger groups, soldiers armed with accurate long range repeating rhyfles with a single LMG per squad. (These are also the guys with the Baguette bags). The more 'modern' radical Crusader faction are broken down into three man teams, each with two short range assault rhyfles backed up with a single larger Heavy Rhyfle.

Very clearly, if you are the kind of person who wants to min/max a squad or army, then you are fucking basic and are not welcome here. You will arrange your Coftryan forces in a manner typical for their standard organisation because that is what Coftryans would do. Its all there, in the very extensive lore. Their baguette bags are hand-sewn because they are a deeply traditionalist faction who believe in the Old Quar ways. I mean if you are fucking with the squad formation why are you playing Coftryans in the first place? Or even playing 'This Quars War'?

So, really, this is actually an historical wargame, just for a history of another world that not that many people actually know.

Who is this for?

I have no idea who 'This Quars War' is for. Well, me obviously. But how many of 'me' are there? I only know of one.

The unique tonality of this light, gentle sad and whimsical species from a magic world (with no magic or fantastic elements at all), and this very very deep pseudohistorical lore and quite crunchy somewhat odd ruleset, which has a lot of depth, simulation and quirks, but is very obviously set up to be a granular simulation roleplay competition between friends rather than the the kind of crunchy explicit wargame to be played between near strangers with no particular context to the battle where the crunch goes to removing any possible source of disagreement or misinterpretation.

I mean, there are people who might want to roleplay cute anteater people, and people who might want to roleplay the cute anteater people in a very too-real horrors of industrial warfare situation. These are your Hippies.

And there are people who might want a very crunchy but also pretty open wargame you can play at 28mm, 15mm or 6mm with a general simulation of battlefield tactics and perhaps might want to re-fight the historic 'Battle for Gate 13' during the Crusader/Coftryr conflict of 1781, (if that were a real thing that actually happened in real life). These are your Grogs.

And there are people who might really like diving into an extremely deep and specific Paracosm set in an alternate world with an alternate featherless biped doing complex international realtions, cultural change, revolutionary war and industry, just for the pleasure of the details. These are your Patricks.

To be into this you really need to be, at least two, but probably all three of these, or at least two; a Hippie-Grog-Patrick or something.

This is a very nutty, particular and original thing and if you didn't already know about it and are finding out here you probably already have a good idea if this is the kind of thing you are into.

A bunch of the PDF's are free on the website here and the 28mm hard plastic boxed set is available online in a bunch of places.

(I did not get paid for this and I do not take money for recommending this stuff. I am forwarding it in this case because I sense a distant kindred spirit and I feel like someone need to be the person to tell you about this stuff and today that person is me. Also me writing this makes that boxed set a business expense.)

Here is a longish interview with Joshua Qualteri;

Quar will either be the hot new thing or the utterly strange and forgotten old thing that you can dig out and show to the grandkids and explain how you knew about it long ago in the before times.